Making your wedding a personal, meaningful experience takes time and inspiration. Doing it at a distance takes expertise. Enter the wedding planner.

Elizabeth Allen, a prominent New York wedding consultant, no longer sees couples automatically choosing hometown weddings. In California, Marianne Weiman-Nelson, a leading Beverly Hills wedding planner and owner of Special Occasions, Inc., is now arranging more out-of-town weddings than local weddings. As ties to hometowns weaken, romantic and distant destinations beckon. If guests must travel anyway, why not travel to Italy, Jamaica, Hawaii, the Caribbean or perhaps the Bahamas. Continental locations like Palm Beach, Newport, New Orleans, the California coast or Cape Cod entice. In Newport, RI, more than half of all couples wed come from out-of-state.

Weiman-Nelson warns that couples, working on their own, frequently make the costly mistake of bringing too many vendors with them instead of using local services. Even then, they may still have to negotiate language and customs barriers, legal regulations, weather conditions as well as travel and accommodation logistics for themselves, vendors, guests and their children. "Especially in Europe, you need to take care of your guests," she explains. Her policy is to provide all guests with welcoming letters, maps, booklets of activities, instructions on using local transportation, planned English-speaking tours and her own cell phone number. Yet, it doesn't require a castle in Scotland or a gondola in Venice to make a wedding memorable; it's all about personalization. "It will be the personal things that you remember that will make your wedding special," Susan Allen, of Elizabeth Allen, Inc. explains. "Guests will really notice. It makes an impact. Everyone has different ideas of how they want to do something, the barriers have come down."

Elizabeth Allen particularly encourages couples of different ethnic backgrounds to embrace as many of their varied cultural traditions as possible even if they're not wedding specific. She sees ethnic foods, music and bilingual invitations, programs and menus as providing opportunities for meaningful personalization...

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