I have a destination wedding I’m going to be photographing coming up this August in Iceland.  I love destination weddings, but to be perfectly honest I know nothing about Iceland and it’s making me a little nervous.

I have a process for researching new places though and it generally works out pretty good.  Heck, when it doesn’t work out it’s still fun.

Google search the place of your destination weddings

I start my research of places to travel for destination weddings easy enough with a quick google search.  It honestly doesn’t give you much information to search “Iceland” since it’s so broad, but it will start giving you some basic idea of what the place looks like and what the biggest attractions are.

Google news

Nowadays, google may also give you some news articles at the top of the search that may (or may not) give you some juicy tidbits about what’s going on in the country.

Evidently Iceland has some scandals!

Image Search

Don’t forget to do an image search as well.  You’ll be shown the most popular places to visit of course, but this is your basic skeleton of understanding where you’re going to visit.  And hey, the places everyone visits are popular for a reason so they just might be worth going to see.

Heck yea, I’m going here!

Map Search

I also do a map search so I can start getting some understanding of the geography.  Where are the big attractions?  What are the major cities?  What are the roads like?  All over the place or very few main ones?  Are there lakes, bays, mountains, etc.?   What other countries is it near?

You may not be making any exact plans at this point, but are just building a basic understanding.  Like looking at this map of Iceland, I can see there is one main road that circles the island.  There’s also some pretty significant national parks that I may want to look into.

Travel books

There is absolutely still a place for travel guides in figuring out your destination weddings.  Sure you can find all the information you need online, but a travel book condenses it into a handy dandy item for carrying.  This means that when I take my trip to iceland and my phone doesn’t work and there’s no internet cafe anywhere on the glacier, I can still look up information.  Technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!

Blogs

Once I have my bearings, I like to start learning about people’s personal experiences both for travel and for destination weddings.  This is when you learn about issues you may face and off the road spots that you’d never learn about from a guide book or tourism website.

Start typing in more personalize searches like

• my trip to Iceland
• I got married in Iceland
• Iceland in August

And as you do these general searches, you’ll see more searches you can do and dig deeper and deeper.

Planning the wedding

Since this is for your destination wedding, don’t forget to search specifically for that.

This will give you information more specific to your destination wedding planning.  You’ll be able to collect ideas for locations for your wedding and find resources to help you such as a florist, officiant and so on.

Have the right attitude

The most important piece for planning your destination wedding is for you to have the right attitude.  Travel is fun and exciting and it’s a great opportunity to learn new things.  Don’t get stressed out by all the information, get excited that there’s so much to learn!

This is actually my favorite thing about traveling.  I love to learn and especially learn about different cultures.  Yes it’s stressful, I’m not going to pretend there aren’t difficulties, but it’s more than worth it!  If you find you’re getting stressed out, join a forum or some online community and there will be tons of people happy to jump in and help you get your destination wedding planned!