Destination Wedding Calculator

Guest Count multiplies through three destination-side costs at once -- the per-guest travel subsidy, the assumed $50 welcome/activity cost, and the assumed $100 resort catering rate, for $350 of destination cost added per guest before any subsidy -- while it only multiplies through one local-side cost, the assumed $150 local catering rate. Once the built-in destination per-guest costs exceed the local per-guest catering rate, adding guests actually widens the gap in the local option's favor, which is the opposite of the popular assumption that destination weddings are automatically cheaper.

This calculator is built to isolate the cost difference between venue and logistics choices at a fixed guest list size, rather than modeling the common real-world pattern where a destination wedding naturally draws fewer attendees because travel filters out some invitees. If you expect your actual destination guest list to be meaningfully smaller than what a local wedding would draw, run the calculator twice with different Guest Count values to compare those two distinct scenarios directly.

It's the gap between an assumed $1,500 average per-guest travel-and-lodging cost for a destination wedding and whatever Guest Travel Subsidy you're contributing per person, floored at zero so the reported burden never dips below zero. If your subsidy meets or exceeds that $1,500 assumption, Guest Out-of-Pocket reads zero, meaning your subsidy is estimated to fully cover a typical guest's travel costs.

Savings is Local Total minus Destination Total, so a negative value means the destination option is actually projected to cost more overall, not less. This happens whenever the combined destination-side costs (venue, travel, subsidies, welcome events, and catering) exceed the simpler local-side total at your entered Guest Count -- it's a real result of the underlying assumptions, not an error, and often signals that a smaller destination guest list is what would be needed to realize the savings many couples expect.