The 2020 Destination Wedding Index
There are plenty of benefits of getting married abroad, from beautiful locations to cheaper costs. On top of all that, you can take a holiday while you’re out there! If you’re considering a destination wedding, we’ve done the hard work for you, comparing different destinations based on a number of factors, from the weather to hotel prices, and even whether they are LGBTQ+ friendly.
Take a look at our ranking and see if you can find the best city for your destination wedding. And if you're looking for the perfect gift, browse our selection of wedding cards and flowers.
Top Wedding Destinations for:
With the full rankings as:
Methodology:
We selected our destinations from a number of sources:
https://www.theknot.com/content/best-destination-wedding-locations https://junebugweddings.com/wedding-blog/the-best-destination-wedding-locations-for-2019/ https://www.hitched.co.uk/wedding-planning/honeymoon-articles/top-10-destinations-for-weddings-abroad/ https://www.brides.com/story/best-destination-wedding-location-ideas
We then determined the best time to get married in each destination using a variety of sources. The temperatures and rainfall figures came from www.weatherbase.com and hotel prices from www.booking.com.
We also included data regarding same-sex marriage and gave an LGBTQ+ friendly score. This information came from ilga.org and we created a score using the data provided in their ‘State Sponsored Homophobia’ report. This report looked at a variety of factors, including the legality of same-sex sexual acts, the country’s stance on family laws for the LGBTQ+ community and the protections afforded LGBTQ+ individuals. We awarded a point for every ‘yes’ in the table created by ilga.org, creating a score out of 11, with a higher score indicating a more LGBTQ+ friendly country.
We then took a look at the number of relevant hashtags on Instagram to see how many posts exist of weddings in these destinations. To get this number we took the highest number for relevant hashtags.
Finally, we used Google Keyword Planner to find the search volume for the keyphrase, ‘Getting Married in X’. This gave us an average number of monthly searches from the UK.
With all of this data collected, we were able to give a ranking using a weighted ranking system. We divided the factors into four categories - weather, cost, LGBTQ+ and online popularity. Each of these four factors were given equal weighting, with those factors which included more than one dataset weighted to equal one.
