What really is a Destination Wedding?
Romance fiction sales have doubled in five years. Romantasy, the genre blending love stories with fantasy worlds, hit $610 million in sales in 2024 alone, up from $454 million the year before. Of course, they are books, but they are cultural objects that tell us something about what people are quietly longing for.
This is happening at the same time that dating has never felt more transactional, more exhausting, or more openly embarrassing to admit. Apps have turned intimacy into a scroll, and situationships have become a vocabulary word. A generation that grew up watching their parents divorce is now being told, by every platform, every discourse cycle, every viral thread: that love is difficult, men are a disappointment, and commitment is a trap.
Yet, despite this, they cannot stop reading about falling in love, and when they actually do fall in love, against all the odds the culture has stacked against them, they want to mark it with something that matches the weight of that.
The Most Sceptical Generation Is Also the Most Intentional
The couples who are still choosing to marry are choosing it differently. They have lived together first, built independent lives and have the financial autonomy to walk away. They are not doing this because society expects them to, or because there was a timeline to follow. They are doing it because it means something specific to them, and that specificity changes everything about what the wedding should be. Not a reception for 200 people they feel obligated to invite, but something that actually feels like the decision they made.
That shift is rewriting what a wedding is, especially the “destination wedding”.
For years, “destination wedding” meant one thing: a flight, a foreign country or a resort package. That definition is now too small for what’s being built. The couples building the most intentional celebrations in 2025 are not necessarily flying anywhere.
Couples are choosing the restaurant where they had their first real conversation, bought out for the night. A private dining room above a wine bar they love, a gallery, a chef's kitchen, and a bookshop after hours. Not wedding venues but places that already hold meaning, converted into one through sheer intentionality. They are sequencing arrival drinks, curating menus around their actual taste, and designing a guest journey from first moment to last. Choosing spaces that already have an atmosphere so the design work is already half done.
Destination has become a standard of experience, not a postcode.
Here’s the data reflecting it:
73% of couples who chose micro-weddings (typically 50 guests or fewer) spent more per guest than traditional weddings.
On WeddingWire, one couple described their 15-person celebration as “one big noisy dinner party.”
On Reddit’s r/weddingplanning, one bride posted her $4,200 elopement with 12 guests: courthouse ceremony, Airbnb dinner, golden hour photos. The top comment read: “This gave me more joy than my friend’s $60K wedding.”
On Pinterest, searches for “civil ceremony photography” are rising sharply, and documentary and editorial photography, which is raw, unfiltered, and cinematic, have surged. (This video is not from Pinterest, but PLEASE watch this wedding documentary, it is incredibly well done)
The platform’s own 2025 trend report notes that authenticity and personalisation have taken centre stage, with couples designing celebrations that, in their words, “speak directly to their aesthetic and not to convention.”
As one planner put it, the ideal restaurant wedding has between 35 and 70 guests, creating “a wedding that immediately makes things intimate and allows you to really connect with everyone there.” That is not a compromise. That is the brief.
The bar for what “designed” feels like has moved permanently.
Brands and vendors who show up still selling a package like the ballroom, the per-head menu or the timeline, will feel instantly behind a couple who have already thought harder about their guest experience than most hospitality professionals do.
Hi, I'm Mel! I work with brands at the intersection of culture, experience, and strategy, helping them untangle what's shifting and building the thinking that turns that into action. If you're sitting with a question about where your brand sits in a shift like this, I'd love to think it through with you! Let's talk on a 1:1 call!
