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Planning for your honeymoon can be even more fun
than planning the wedding. Here are a few helpful honeymoon hints and tips
to help save you time, hassles and money!
Planning & Travel Tips:
- Set a budget for your honeymoon.
- Have a separate email address for all your wedding and honeymoon plans.
Sign up for a free email account at a place such as gmail or hotmail. Use
this email address for signing up for mail lists, e-news and other contests
at wedding and travel sites. Ex.
Mywedding@gmail.com.
Then, when you’re done with the wedding and honeymoon, you can delete that
email account so you no longer receive emails for wedding and
honeymoon-related companies. All it takes is one typo on a wedding date, such
as 7/7/08 vs. 7/7/07, and you can be receiving wedding-related email for
months after your wedding. At this site we try to be very careful about
that.
- Choose a destination based on both your budget and the amount of time you
will have to travel.
If you’re on the east coast – Hawaii is such a
long flight that your travel to and from Hawaii will take up 2 days of your
trip so a week to 10 days is suggested. On the other hand, a flight to
Orlando, Florida from Philadelphia or Atlantic City is a little less than 3
hours. So if you only have 5 days for a honeymoon, DisneyWorld or a Caribbean
island might be a better choice. Pick up free travel brochures and start
getting ideas for your honeymoon on the internet.
- All-Inclusive Resort Tips:
- Decide what type of resort you want
and find out what amenities are included. Decide if you want a
couples-only such as Sandals, that caters to honeymooners, and compare
amenities among resorts. Sandals, for example, includes a free wedding
ceremony when you book a honeymoon at their resort. Be sure you know what is
included. Are all tips and gratuities included? At some all-inclusive resorts,
alcoholic beverages may or may not be included. Shore excursions are usually
extra but transportation to and from your airport to your resort may be
included.
- Check out on-line video and reviews of popular honeymoon resorts and
destinations.
YouTube.com
has amateur video of many popular honeymoon resorts. Another great source for
video, virtual tours and trip reviews is tripadvisor.com.
Sandals.com
has lots of great photos and video of their resorts.
Another great site with video and virtual tours of resorts throughout the
world, including many popular Caribbean resorts, is hotelview.com.
Chatrooms and travel boards are also great for unbiased guest reviews.
Wherever you travel, be sure to tell your travel agent, resort, cruise
line, or Disney rep that you’re on your honeymoon. It’s often good
for extra perks, maybe a free bottle of champagne in your room, a special
cake, or a front-of-the-line bump-up if you’re wearing Mickey and Minnie
bride and groom ears at Disney.
Consider Travel / Hurricane Insurance. Travel insurance is really
quite affordable and a great way to protect your honeymoon trip. If a
hurricane or family emergency prevents you from taking your honeymoon, travel
insurance will often provide a full refund on your trip.
- Safety tip
– Rather than carry all your spending money as cash,
consider bringing some Travelers checks that can be replaced if lost or
stolen.
- Ask friends and relatives about their recent honeymoon or vacation
travels.
Reviews from friends and family are a great source of unbiased
information regarding resorts, the feel of an island, amenities, etc.
- For airline travel, book your airline ticket using your maiden name so it
matches all your travel identification
unless you’re taking a delayed
honeymoon. This will save time and confusion at the airport or cruise ship
ports. If your travel documents don’t match it could cause delays in line
and in other countries.
- Apply early for a passport and make sure you know what travel documents
are required for your honeymoon destination!
Passports
are now being recommended for all travel outside the U.S. including Canada,
Mexico and the Caribbean, especially if you plan to travel by air.
While alternate forms of I.D. are still acceptable for some travel to the
Caribbean, etc., that is subject to change. If you're not sure if you need
a passport, ask your travel agent.
- Have a detailed packing checklist
! You don’t want to forget
something vital or important. On your checklist, in addition to clothing
items, include a list of travel documents to bring, printouts and confirmation
numbers for anything booked online, toiletries, prescriptions, family phone
numbers, sunscreen, cameras, and other essentials for the climate and
destination you’ve chosen.
- Hot Honeymoon-Saving Tip:
Sunscreen often DOES NOT WORK WELL ENOUGH
TO PREVENT SERIOUS SUNBURN. On a recent Disney land-sea vacation during
July many people wearing #50 waterproof sunscreen (including my husband) ended
up with serious sunburn. Swim shirts are recommended for both men
and women if you plan to do any snorkeling or spend significant time
outside in the Caribbean. Also bring Aloe-Vera Gel, available in travel-size
bottles at Target and other department stores. It helps cool a sunburn, just
in case.
- To make your wedding and honeymoon a little less hectic, schedule your
honeymoon travel for the day after the wedding, if possible.
You spend a
long time planning your wedding so you wouldn’t want to rush out of the
reception to catch a flight a few hours later.
- Remember, while you don’t want to spend 50 hours planning your
honeymoon, part of the fun of a trip is the planning
. Once you’ve
decided on your destination, choosing the package, the resort, the room, the
options, deals and meals, becomes fun! Do remember to schedule/plan some
down-time where you can relax in each other’s company, enjoying not-planning,
not-scheduling, not-deciding and not-doing. Sounds kind of Buddhist but
after spending months on your wedding plans, that works!
Money-saving tips:
Money saving tip #1 – Book
well in advance to get better rates, especially on cruises and airfare. With
cruises, for example, you can tell when rates are lower by looking at all the
rates for the same cruise for a one-year period.
- Money saving tip #2
– Choose a honeymoon location that is
off-season – i.e. in the Caribbean, mid-summer (the height of the heat)
is considered off-season for many Caribbean resorts. October/Early November,
during the peak of Hurricane season, you may also find some good deals. On the
other hand, July 4 is peak season for DisneyWorld Orlando because school is
out. According to an article on about.com
April is the cheapest time to visit Jamaica, May the cheapest time to visit
Hawaii, September the cheapest time to hit Orlando and October the cheapest
time to travel to Costa Rica or St. Martin.
Money saving tip #3 - Don’t automatically assume that you’ll
save money by booking your honeymoon airfare and hotels on your own. Some
travel agents, such as Liberty Travel, have price-match guarantees and, often,
better package deals. Peruse the Sunday travel sections of the newspaper or
subscribe to travel agent’s e-news. By perusing the travel section and
specials offered online you can get a better idea of what a good deal really
is. On our most recent vacation to DisneyWorld, I spoke with a woman who
booked her family trip online. The airline couldn’t find their
e-reservations so they missed their flight. When they finally arrived in
Orlando a day late, their hotel gave their room to someone else because they
didn’t check in the previous night. By the time they got a room they had
lost almost 2 days of a one-week vacation and hadn’t slept much at all
because they were stuck in an airport and then at their hotel waiting for a
room.
Money saving tip #4 – If you’re living in the South Jersey
area, Spirit Airlines out of Atlantic City often has inexpensive
flights to Orlando/DisneyWorld and other popular honeymoon destinations in the
Caribbean. Sign up at spiritair.com
to receive email alerts for weekly specials and red light sales.
- Safety /Money saving tip #5
– If you are traveling outside of resort
areas in many Caribbean islands take extra safety precautions. The poverty on
many Caribbean islands makes Americans an easy target for pickpockets.
Additionally, even though most islanders are friendly, they’re always trying
to get you to buy something, braid your hair or smoke some "trees,"
and it becomes annoying rather quickly. Of course, that’s not to say that
many of the resorts and cruise lines aren’t doing the same thing - trying to
sell you lots of "extras" from photos and souvenir glasses to
keychains and water bottle lanyards. To save money, don’t get sucked into
a lot of extra souvenirs. Choose a couple "key" souvenirs to
remember your honeymoon and avoid the rest.
- Money saving tip #6 - You can save money on resort- or cruise-sponsored
excursions by doing it yourself.
If you’re staying at a resort or on a
cruise, consider splitting the cost of a cab to popular tourist attractions
with another couple. You can save considerable money over going through the
resort or ship. However, not all cab drivers are honest, especially on the
islands. And, if they don’t get you back to your cruise ship on time, that
could be a problem. Do research costs ahead of time online. Find out admission
fees for popular tourist attractions and typical cab fare between
destinations. Often the cab fare and the admission fee to a popular attraction
can be considerably less than a resort- or cruise-sponsored excursion to the
same location. Other times, the extra $10-$20 per person a resort or cruise
ship charges can be well worth avoiding the hassle of local cab drivers.
- Money saving tip #7 -
If you’re planning a cruise, in addition to
booking early and during the off-season, to save even more money, choose a
stateroom without a balcony and/or port-hole window unless
you plan to spend your whole honeymoon in your stateroom. Most people,
honeymooners included, do not spend all day in their stateroom and when you
are in the stateroom it’s usually nighttime anyway, so not a whole lot to
see out the port hole.
- Money saving tip #8
– Consider a Honeymoon Registry. A
honeymoon registry allows your wedding guests to help pay for your honeymoon.
Instead of a traditional wedding gift, your guests can register to pay for a
shore excursion, a "his and hers" spa massage at your resort, or any
portion of your honeymoon trip.
- Money saving tip #9 –
Before you buy travel guides on your
honeymoon destination, check to see what travel books are available at the
local library. Some travel books are geared to families, some to couples
and some, such as the Frommer’s guides, cover everything from A to Z. By
using your local library you can peruse travel books for tips and ideas or to
decide which book you really want to purchase.
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Check out some of our many honeymoon articles on everything from cruises
to all-inclusive resorts.
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