One of the most exciting parts of organizing a wedding is organizing your honeymoon – your first adventure as a married couple! While it sounds like an easy task – don’t be fooled - organising a honeymoon on top of your wedding can bring about stress. Both being adventurers at heart (with sometimes differing ideas of what we want to experience on an adventure) my fiancé and I started organizing our honeymoon early to ensure we both get the adventure of our dreams (and without hurting our bank account). Here’s some tips that we found useful that will help plan a stress-free honeymoon.

1. Work out your budget

This might seem like a no brainer, but sometimes we leave this part to the very end of the process and find that we have wasted so much time researching trips that we can’t afford. So before you start any research or set up meetings with your local travel agent it’s best you work out what your budget is. I mean, I would love to go to a private tropical island for my honeymoon but I also don’t earn a shitload of money…..so let’s scratch that off the list. But really – it’s best to sit down and have an honest financial discussion about what you both feel you can realistically afford to pay for a holiday on top of your wedding costs. My fiancé and I worked out that we would be comfortable with a max $10k budget for an international trip but if we travelled domestically it would have to be max $5k.

By working out a rough idea of our budget and what we were willing to pay for both internationally and domestically gave as a foundation of the next step – research – and would be used as our “financial compass” as to what would be financially possible burning a hole in our wallets.

2. Research your ideal destinations – and don’t be afraid to ask for suggestions on social media

Now that you have your budget figured out it’s now time for the fun stuff – travel research!!

Instagram, Pinterest and good ol’ google will become your friends as you start researching your ideal place to de-stress and spend 2 weeks (or more) soaking up the romance and happiness of being newlyweds.

Top things to ensure you research online would be:

· Best (or worst) time of year to travel to the destination
· Reviews of hotels/ airlines / activities – Tripadviser, Google Reviews and Facebook are GREAT for this.
· Any travel notices (in Australia this is the SmartTraveller website) that keep travelers updated on the travel advice for a particular country.

BUT, if researching a holiday by scratch isn’t your jam and you’d much prefer to research honeymoon packages that have been created by travel professionals, you can find these on these wedding websites www.easyweddings.com.au, www.theknot.com.au or your trusty travel agencies – even a fun travel experience like Contiki can be suitable for adventurous newlyweds that don’t mind spending their honeymoon on the go and with other people (my fiancé and I seriously considered this for our honeymoon, but it fell out of our budget for what we wanted to spend for 2 weeks.)

Also, social media is the BEST way to ask for recommendations and get some inspiration on what you might want to do on your honeymoon. So my fiancé and I are going to Tasmania for honeymoon – neither of us have ever been – but we knew that someone on our social platforms would have or know someone who has and would be able to give us suggestions on what they think we might like to do. This proved to be a very valuable (and time efficient) way to gather as much information on the activities to do, places to visit/stay/eat and also ideas on when throughout the year to go. Now we knew we wanted to go in winter, so once we made that clear to people the winter themed activities game flooding in. In one post you can gather so many ideas that would have taken HOURS of research to find.

3. Talk to a Travel Agent

Being a travel enthusiast doesn’t mean I always like to book my adventures myself – hey, it can be stressful at times! For something as important as your honeymoon I would always advise to discuss your adventure with a travel agent for 2 reasons:

· It gives you more ideas of things to do and places to stay within your budget for your honeymoon that you may not have thought of during your own research
· Alleviates the stress and pressure that can come with liaising with various vendors/hotels/transport companies etc and you always have someone to reach out to IF there are any issues that arise during your honeymoon, especially if you are going overseas.

By talking to a travel agent you can also get a sanity check on whether everything you want to do and see is truly achievable within the budget you’ve set. What it also does is identify several accommodation options that you should then research them and their competitors if you want to shop around for the best value for money.

4. Be realistic about travel timings

Depending on the type of honeymoon you go on, this may or may not be totally relevant. But (like me) if you’re doing a bit of travelling – keep in mind to allow for travel timings in your daily activities itinerary. My fiancé and I are doing a road trip around Tasmania, so we have agreed that we won’t be driving over 8 hours a day on those days that we are scheduled to be travelling between locations. This also allows us to better plan our daily schedules (eg. What time we want to be on the road and arrive in our destination by) and make sure we take in the sights along the way.

5. Make time for special moments

This is important. And kind of stems off the “be realistic about travel timings” – be realistic about the time you want to spend exploring and the time that you want to spend relaxing. If you’re like me, when you’re on an adventure you just want to go, go go! There are so many places to see and so little time to see them. But make sure to include some down time in your honeymoon and time for special moments – like date night! Yes, your entire honeymoon is essentially “date night”, but I mean actually make time to get dressed up, do your hair and makeup and go to fancy restaurant or go to an art gallery or a comedy show or theatre and have a date with your husband/wife.

On top of everything else, have FUN organising your honeymoon! It's your first adventure as a married couple - enjoy it!

Stay inspired,

Lara x