Sandals Wedding – Lazy Escapes

I know some of you have heard that we got married on our recent trip to Sandals. (WOO HOO!!) Since this is a “pretty big deal”, and I can’t find a lot of blogs on line about the whole Sandals wedding experience, I decided to blog about it here so if you are thinking about doing a Sandals wedding, you will know exactly what to expect.

What to Expect

We went into this with the idea that we know a wedding in the US would cost a lot of money, so whatever Sandals provide us for “free” would be a great starting point for us, price-wise. So for starters, let me just say that the free Sandals wedding package is VERY inclusive and TRULY free (with 3 nights or longer booking). With that being said, Sandals allow you to “customize” everything, so there are PLENTY of things you can “add-on” to the free wedding. Furthermore, those add-on options are PRICEY.

This is a Destination Wedding

Before you go full blown with planning a wedding by Sandals, keep in mind that this is a destination wedding. That means 1. Your guest list will likely be scarce. Although we have seen and heard some people with over 100 guests, about half of the people that get married at Sandals have less than 2 guests. So don’t feel bad if you have no guests at all, as long as you are OK with it. We had 0 guests. 2. Since the wedding location is on a public location, be prepared for other hotel guests to be walking by and hollering. This was helpful to us since we had no guests – it made it feel more like a real wedding. People were overall very friendly and respectful. 3. Since it’s a destination wedding, you will have to pack all your clothes, wedding gown, tux, etc. This makes traveling definitely more cumbersome. If you are unsure about whether this is for you, click here to check out Sandals “Test-Drive” option!!

The Timeline

Once you make a reservation with Sandals and let them know that you plan on having your wedding there, you will be assigned a wedding planner. This wedding planner will call you to check-in periodically and answer all your questions! This was so helpful because we had a lot of questions! Our wedding planner always set up our follow up phone appointment before the end of the call, and she always called on-time. You can request your calls to be more frequent or less frequent – they are very flexible. During these phone calls, you can discuss things like, the flavor of the cake, options for the decor, bouquet, location of the venue, etc etc. Since each Sandals resort has different options, I will just discuss what we decided to do here:

We chose to do a cake tasting on site (complimentary) to choose the flavor and icing of our wedding cake. We ended up choosing vanilla cake with pina colada icing.
We chose to pick our venue on site – the onsite wedding planner took us on a tour and showed us all of the options. We ended up paying for the premium upgrade for the Over Water Chapel ($750) mostly because it’s the most private location of all.
We chose the complimentary options for bouquet, boutonniere, decor, and chairs.
We brought our own music (complimentary). By choosing our own music, we were told to bring 4 songs – 1 for the bride walking down the aisle, 1 for signing the documents, 1 for exiting the venue, and 1 for first dance.
With our free wedding package, we were given a free foot massage for the groom and a free manicure for the bride. These options are no longer available but Sandals is giving bride and groom 15% discount on spa services instead (at time of this writing).
We booked a hairstyling appointment ($100) and a makeup session ($84) for the bride. We are VERY happy with how these sessions turned out. Especially the hair, as I have very stubborn hair! The only surprise was that I had to pay $50 to get fake eyelashes put in. If you plan on booking these sessions, my advice is book it at least 3 hours before the time of your wedding. My appointments took over 2 hours. By giving yourself extra time, you would have a chance to correct anything you don’t like. The ladies at the spa are very nice and will do their best to make you happy, but if you are out of time then you are out of luck…
For the ceremony, we chose the religious ceremony with Sandals provided officiant. This was all complimentary. However, if you were doing a non-religious ceremony, there’s an extra fee.
Our paperwork/registration fees were waived due to the fact we booked 7(+) nights.
For the cocktail reception, we were given a list of drinks to choose from as our “signature drink”. We chose “Mint to Be”. You can see the full list of options right here: Bride and Groom Signature Cocktails and Mocktails. Your cocktails are served to you by a dedicated staff.
For the reception, we chose the complimentary option since we had no guests. We were served hors d’oeuvres that exceeded my expectations. This was good because we had not eaten all day!
One of the main issues of not having any friends and family on site is that we don’t have anyone to take pictures for us. With the free wedding package, you literally only get ONE photo for free. We looked through all of the photo packages and decided to go with the $595 photography package, which gave us a photographer for 2 hours, among other things. The photographer had no problem going overtime, and took hundreds of photos. Since our wedding was at 4pm, the photographer was booked from 4pm to 6pm, which covered the entire ceremony, reception, as well as some sunset shots. My husband even brought another jacket to change into for some more casual shots featuring his favorite sports team!

The Wedding Day

So undoubtedly this was the part I was most nervous about. We both have pretty bad luck when it comes to things like this – whatever can go wrong usually goes wrong for us. We are used to having to do things twice – but this doesn’t really have that option!

Thanks to Sandals, I can now say with certainty that all of our worries were unfounded. The wedding team thought of everything! Here’s the order of how things happened for us (nothing was a surprise as we were given exact times for everything during our wedding orientation on site):

Bride and Groom individually getting ready – Ted got foot massage, then got ready in the room while I got nails, hair, and makeup done at the spa.
Bride went to room to get ready while Groom went to Club Sandals to wait for Wedding planner. At this point, the Officiant was already at Club Sandals. Wedding planner showed up right on time with boutonniere, helped Ted with any last minute touches, walked him to the venue together with the Officiant. Photographer was already on location taking pictures.
Wedding planner left the venue to go to the room where I was nervously waiting. Wedding planner showed up with the bouquet, helped me with zipping up my dress, made sure all my song choices were clear, took my cellphone and obtained the code to unlock, and helped me into a special golf cart decorated just for weddings. Off we went to the venue (Overwater Chapel) where Ted and the Officiant have been waiting.
As I was riding in a golf cart in my wedding dress, people made way and cheered. When we arrived, wedding planner told me to wait at the entrance to the chapel, and start walking as soon as I hear the music.
More pictures were taken as I exited the golf cart, stood and waited. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to hear the music that well as it’s quite a long walk. But just like everything else, Sandals didn’t cut corners – they had a nice sound system with speakers extended from the chapel all the way to the edge of the beach. I’m sure everyone on the beach could hear the songs we picked out… (A bit embarrassing…)
I walked in while our song played (“You’re Still the One” by Shania Twain). I could see Ted standing there and honestly couldn’t believe this was happening!
The Officiant spoke – he was so funny and really helped us settle our nerves a bit. Then I read my vows first, and Ted read his. We signed the paperwork, had our first kiss, and danced! (They only allow ONE dance. If you want more than one, you will have to pay a rental fee for their Bluetooth speakers.)
After that, we were led out of the chapel and taken to the intimate reception area (a romantic little hut in the water). Nothing felt rushed at all and a lot of pictures were taken throughout all of this.
The hut had been set up with cake, champagne, our signature drinks, hor’ d’oeuvres, and fruits. We had a team of dedicated staff that helped us with cutting the cake, serving and bartending. When finished, the staff members wrapped up the unfinished cake and sent it to our room.
We got more pictures taken with the photographer as the sun was setting down.

I couldn’t have possibly asked for anything more. Getting married to Ted was a dream come true and I still can’t believe how perfect everything was!!

After the Wedding

Our free wedding package also comes with romantic turndown service. Our bed was romantically decorated. We were given a special breakfast menu. However, these amenities are not really worthwhile due to the fact we were staying at an Overwater Bungalow which already provided these services any time we wanted. We were also given a lot of keepsakes, such as beach bags, keepsake cards, a picture frame, etc.

Is there ANYTHING We Would have Done Differently?

The number ONE thing I would have done differently is… taking off my Apple watch. My wedding dress was white, so my black Apple watch stood out in photos like a sore thumb. Since I wear my Apple watch to showers and sleep, it never occurred to me to take my watch off. Luckily we had so many photos taken from every angle, that we were able to pick out plenty of photos we liked without showing my watch, but if I could go back in “time”, I would have definitely let behind my “time”piece.

I also wish I had not been so stressed out about the whole thing… We arrived on 12/24, and initially had our wedding scheduled for 12/28, but ended up moving it to 12/30. Looking back, I wish we had done it earlier in our trip so we wouldn’t have spent most of the beginning of the trip worrying about the ceremony.

What Now?

To be honest, the whole experience was so positive that we already booked our next Sandals trip and plan to do a retie-the-knot package next time! Our official marriage license was mailed to us through UPS (signature required delivery) a month from the date of of the wedding. We received all of our photos and slideshow through the SnapShots studio and we’ve been working on a scrap book to keep all the great memories!