How we paid for our honeymoon
The ways we were able to afford a lavish adventure
We knew we wanted to go all out for our honeymoon, and below are the ways we managed our finances to allow us to do so.
Corporate Perks
Look into any and all perks your company may have. So many corporate benefits aren’t widely advertised until you go looking for them. I’m so lucky to work for an organization who offers such things. For example, we were booking a car to get us from Florence to Tuscany. Booking directly on Avis would have cost us two grand; booking through my corporate benefits on Avis ended up costing only 40% of that original quote. For the same car! I had never even heard of this perk until I searched our intranet.
My husband also gets an annual travel stipend. We were able to use this towards our original flight bookings. Not every company offers something so generous, but it’s worth poking around for to see what sort of discounts or stipends you’re offered.
Booking ahead
We saved a ton by booking in advance. We knew we wanted business class train tickets for our trip from Rome to Florence to ease the stress of lugging four suitcases onto the train. This ended up only being $15 more per ticket for a quiet car that had tons of storage and plenty of open seats. We also got free waters and snacks in the car, so we pretty much broke even.
Our travel philosophy is that if it’s not much more expensive, we are always willing to spend a little for ease and convenience. The prices months in advance are always less expensive ahead of time and easier to justify.
Flights
We started booking all of our travel on same airline a couple of years ago. We are way behind on this, and honestly, we don’t travel enough to really make a difference, but we were still able to rack up enough points to upgrade both legs of our flight to United Polaris.
Speaking of upgrades: it is almost always cheaper to buy economy and upgrade later rather than booking business class immediately. We spent about half of the original projected cost of Polaris tickets (had we initially booked business class) by booking Premium Economy and upgrading later.
Credit Card Points
We both have the Chase travel card and absolutely love it, especially since we dine out so often. We paid for three of our five 5-star hotels with credit card points alone. You can also cash in for Airbnb gift cards! I’m about to book another international trip for my mom’s 60th birthday and will be able to pay for our hotels on points alone.
We didn’t use an airline credit card for this trip, but we are looking into a one year anniversary trip and may sign up for the United Card (this is our airline of choice given our local airports and future / frequent destinations). A friend recently shared that she was able to buy every flight of 2022 with points for her United card for her family of four. Sold!
Smaller wedding & delayed honeymoon
We chose to have a ‘small’ wedding with 75 guests. It wasn’t a microwedding, but it also wasn’t a 350 person affair. We opted out of bridal parties, which meant less gifts, less florals, less spending.
While that isn’t controllable for everyone, we also chose to delay our honeymoon for 6 months. Our original plan was to take a ‘minimoon’ to Napa immediately after the wedding. This plan was derailed by my husband rupturing his Achilles 10 days before our wedding (yep.) which meant he needed surgery and would not be cleared to fly.
This ended up being one of the greatest unintended consequences of his injury. We saved so much money by canceling what was meat to be a small trip, but ended up being quite expensive and were able to put our canceled flight credits towards our honeymoon. Our friends generously lent us their vacation home for the month of December as solace for a crazy few months, and we 30 hours roadtripping for three weeks at the beach. All this to say, we were able to save up a ton over 6 months to really go all out for the honeymoon!