Cruise lines can make a lot of adjustments when it comes to weddings at sea. They suggest you bring your own wedding party.
While a popular wedding tradition is to wear something borrowed, one bride who booked a recent cruise wedding with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL) had an unusual request when it came to requesting a loan item. She wanted to rent a flower girl and ring bearer for the procession because she didn’t have any children in her wedding party.
Valery Rene, manager of on-board revenue for RCCL, says, “Unfortunately we couldn’t accommodate that particular idea, but we do about 1,000 weddings a year and can meet many other special requests.”
Cruise weddings have grown in popularity in the last 10 years because they offer affordable, one-stop shopping for both a wedding and honeymoon. The opportunity to have the event in a special location whether it’s on a spectacular glacier, tropical beach or by a captain on the top deck, has high appeal with couples who want to do something different.
Even though you’re on a ship, you can still customize your event to the smallest detail, within reason.
The average cruise wedding ceremony and reception with RCCL costs about $10,000, excluding the cruise costs and airfare for sailing guests.
“We help the couple decide whether they would like a shipboard or shoreside wedding and then choose which destination and ship that works for them and their budget,” says Rene. “We often do weddings that cost more than $20,000 and a recent lavish wedding we did was well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There were about 180 sailing guests.”
A basic package includes three hours of planning with a consultant, priority check-in, non-denominational official, ceremony, recorded music, bridal bouquet, marriage certificate, photographer (but not photos; they’re purchased separately) and more.
“We need at least three months (advance notice) due to the legalities of getting a marriage licence and other information. But the average notice is six to nine months,” says Rene.
Captains on some lines can perform the ceremony, but most lines need to book an official from the port-of-call. Permission is based on where the ship is registered and what that government allows. Princess Cruises is one of the few lines whose captains can perform these duties because the ships are registered in Bermuda.
Princess is a leader in cruise weddings and also one of the few lines that has a dedicated wedding department rather than outsourcing the arrangements. Princess’ newest ship, the Ruby, had Trista and Ryan Sutter of The Bachelorette TV show christen the ship in a ceremony that wowed guests with the thousands of red roses displayed.
The official naming was followed by the wedding of Kip Hickman and Danielle Vurpillat, a California couple who won a Princess wedding contest. The Love Boat captain himself, Gavin MacLeod, gave away the bride.
Exclusive to Princess, couples using the ships’ wedding chapels can have live wedding camcorders to share their day with family and friends at home who access via a special web link. The image refreshes every minute, enabling viewers to follow the proceedings.
Tonia Scurr, president of Royal Ocean Events, which handles weddings for Carnival, Holland America and Regent Seven Seas, says they do about 1,000 weddings per year.
Scurr says, “A cruise wedding is easy for the couple and can be less expensive than a land-based wedding especially if it involves non-sailing guests. Many people don’t realize you can do that. Guests can come on-board for the ceremony and reception and leave the ship before it sails.”
Their average wedding includes a package with a bridal bouquet, cake, champagne, photographer, coordinator, official, licence and music. The cost of the reception is extra based on food, drinks and more.
A particularly beautiful wedding featured Canadian Mounties who created an arbour with their swords for the couple to walk under. “Getting permission to bring those swords on the ship was a challenge but it made for gorgeous photos,” says Scurr. “Another wedding included the renewal of vows for both sets of parents who were celebrating their 40th and 50th wedding anniversaries.”
Last March, Siwon Kim and her husband, based in Burnaby, B.C., held their wedding on a Holland America ship in San Diego arranged by Scurr’s company.
The only thing that went wrong was that the music didn’t stop when she finished walking down the aisle. “The minister kept giving people at the back a signal, but they didn’t know why he was waving at them after the ceremony. So I gave the body gesture of waving my hand across my throat like I was cutting it, and my guests thought I was referring to the act of getting married,” she says.
Not all weddings go well. One recent couple sailed together for two days and then cancelled their huge St. Thomas wedding. Another couple broke into a fist-fight after their wedding on Half Moon Cay and the groom left the ship.
