Everyone is flying in,
so the invitation has to say more.

The first is a legal ceremony where you live now, with two witnesses and lunch afterwards, followed weeks or months later by the party at home in front of everyone. Ten people travel, or nobody does. The guest list problem does not arise, because the guest list is the party, and the party is a normal event in a normal place.

The second is the whole wedding somewhere else. The ceremony, the dinner and the dancing all happen in a country your guests reach by air, so you are not organising a day. You are organising a small tour that eighty people have to book themselves onto, with flights, beds, transfers and three days of annual leave attached.

They are planned in opposite directions, and confusing them is the expensive mistake here. The first is led by the party: pick the date that suits the room at home and fit the ceremony around it. The second is led by travel: flight routes, the season, and how far your least mobile guests can be asked to go. Decide which one you are doing before you look at a venue, because the budget, the guest list and the timeline all follow from it.

Marriage law is national, and the details are specific enough that nothing here can be guessed. Every country sets its own requirements: which documents it wants and how recently they were issued, how long the notice period is before a ceremony can take place, whether your papers need an official translation or a legalisation stamp, and whether one of you has to be resident there first. Some places make this straightforward for people who live elsewhere; others do not.

So ask two authorities, early and in writing: the civil registry or town hall that will actually perform the ceremony, and the authority at home that would recognise the marriage afterwards. A ceremony that is entirely legal where it happens can still need registering at home before it counts there, and learning that a year later is a small administrative misery.

The paperwork, not the venue, sets the earliest date you can marry, so it comes before deposits. Plenty of couples settle the question by handling the legal part at home, quietly, in the weeks before they fly, and treating the ceremony abroad as the one that matters to them. That is a legitimate choice rather than a cheat, and it removes the largest source of delay. If you take it, decide early whether you are telling guests.

At home, one more guest costs you a chair and a dinner. Abroad, one more guest costs them a flight, two or three hotel nights and days of leave they were saving for something else. That changes what an invitation is. You are not offering an afternoon out, you are asking for a holiday's worth of money and time.

So put the cost in front of people early. Not a total, which you cannot know, but the parts you do: which airport, how long the transfer takes, what the two hotels you have held rooms at quoted a night, and what you are paying for on the day. Guests are rarely offended by cost. They are offended by discovering it in June for a wedding in August, when the cheap flights have gone.

This is why the save the date matters more here than anywhere else. At home it is a courtesy; abroad it is what lets someone book leave and a sensible fare rather than an expensive one. Eight to twelve months ahead is common practice at home, and further out is reasonable when everyone has to fly. Send it before every detail is settled: a date, a country and a rough idea of what a guest will spend. The save the date guide has wording for the version that carries a cost warning without sounding like a bill.

Then expect a lower acceptance rate than you would get at home, and ask early enough to know. Some of the people you most want there will not manage it.

Write down everything a guest would otherwise have to ask you for. The nearest airport by name rather than by city, because the two are often an hour apart and the wrong one is a different island. How long the drive is at the end. Whether you are laying on a coach to the ceremony and back at the end of the night, whether people need a hire car, and whether taxis genuinely exist there at one in the morning.

Then two hotels at two prices, so nobody has to ask what the cheaper option is. What the weather actually does in that month, rather than the average in a brochure: how cold it gets after sunset, whether an afternoon of rain is normal. What to wear when the ceremony is outdoors, in the way that helps: grass or gravel under heels, heat at two in the afternoon, stone floors in the evening. And whether anything is happening the day before or after, because that decides which flights people book.

None of this fits on a card and should not be attempted. It belongs on one page guests open from a link or a QR code, holding the schedule, the directions, the hotel notes and a place to ask the questions you did not think of; the article on the guest information page goes through it section by section. A live page can also be corrected: when the boat times change you change one line, and every guest sees the new one, including those who read it in March.

This is the part that makes a wedding abroad different from every other event, and the part most couples handle last. Your guests come from several countries. Some read your language comfortably, some read it slowly, and some are relying on the one relative in their row who translates during the speeches. A card printed in two languages is not the answer: it doubles the printing, still misses the third language, and cannot be corrected.

The practical answer is one page that each guest reads in their own language. Vowly's event page is available in nine languages, so the schedule, the directions and the reply form appear to a guest in theirs without you preparing a second version of anything. Your cousin in Warsaw and your friend in Lisbon open the same link and each sees a page they can read.

The parts you write yourself are still your own words, so write them plainly. Short sentences, dates written out rather than in digits that mean different things in different countries, place names spelled the way the local signs spell them, and no idiom. If one large group of guests shares a language you speak, add a short version of your own paragraphs in it. The structure around them will already be theirs.

A reply card has to cross a border twice: stamps your guests do not have, two postal systems, three weeks of silence before you learn nothing. Phone habits do not rescue it either, because the app everyone uses in one country is the one nobody uses in the next, and you end up chasing forty people across four apps and a spreadsheet. A reply link is the same everywhere: one address, one form, every answer in one list.

Ask for more than yes or no. The online RSVP form collects party size, the names of the people coming with them, meal choice, dietary notes and allergens, and a message to you. Party size matters more here than at home, because "we are coming" can mean two people on a cheap fare or a family of five who have taken a flat for the week, and the difference decides your seating and your catering numbers.

Then there is the shape of the week: a welcome dinner on the Friday, the ceremony on the Saturday, a long lunch on the Sunday, and guests arriving at three different points across those days. One yes or no for the wedding gives you a headcount that is wrong for two of the three meals. Vowly lets each part be answered separately, so the Friday dinner and the Sunday lunch have their own numbers, and parts a guest was not invited to can stay invisible to them. Your caterer will want those figures well before the week.

Every wedding abroad has a short list of people who genuinely cannot travel: a grandparent who cannot fly, a friend eight months pregnant, someone whose passport or leave will not allow it. They are usually the people whose absence you feel most, and there is more you can do about it than sending photographs afterwards.

If you want a livestream, decide it months ahead and decide it with the venue. The questions are unglamorous and all of them have to be answered first: is there usable signal at the exact spot where the ceremony happens, which a walled chapel or a hillside garden may not have; does the venue or the officiant permit filming; who is holding the camera, given that it cannot be anyone standing in the ceremony; and where will the joining link live so a ninety-year-old can find it unaided. Test it from that spot at the same time of day, and record as well as stream, because the recording is what people watch.

Afterwards, keep them in the event rather than sending them a summary of it. Guests upload photographs to the gallery on the event page, so someone who watched from home sees the evening as it is added rather than three weeks later. The guest book works the same way: a person who could not travel can still leave a note, and you approve it before it appears alongside everyone else's.

Arrivals will spread over three days, and the schedule should admit it. Someone lands on Thursday afternoon with nothing to do; someone else lands on Saturday morning two hours before the ceremony and needs to know where to go with a suitcase. Publish the arrival window you expect, say which meals are organised and which are not, and be explicit about the thing guests always get wrong, which is what time to be dressed and standing outside the hotel.

The welcome drink on the first evening is not a party. It is a briefing that happens to have a drink in it, and it is the cheapest hour of the week: what time the coach leaves and from where, that the ceremony floor is uneven, that the church asks for shoulders covered, that dinner is later than they are used to. Sixty people hearing it once is sixty phone calls you do not get.

Finally, nominate one person who is not either of you to answer the phone that week, and put their number where guests can find it. Flights are cancelled, hire cars are not ready, a connection is delayed by six hours, and all of it lands on the two days you are least able to deal with it. Keep the invitation page live through the week as well, because a change goes in once and reaches everyone at the same moment. The wedding invitations page is where that link is made, and the calendar file that goes with it puts the right local times into a guest's phone.