I'm considering a cruise wedding

Hi! First post here, I've been browsing for a little while!

There's so many mixed reviews on cruise weddings, but so far I'm not really finding specifically what I'm looking for so I figured I should ask!

We plan on getting married summer of 2015. The only cruise lines we're really considering is Royal and Carnival, just because these are what we are familiar with. Ideally, we would want to get married while at sea, which I know Carnival does not offer, only Royal. I'm looking for people that have gone through this experience and could just provide me with some insight and feedback as to how it was, if they'd do it again, if it's worth it, how much of a hassle everything was.

We're opting to do a cruise wedding as opposed to a "normal" wedding because we admittedly don't have many friends and thought this would be more special and I would rather not deal with a ton of stress around planning a "normal" wedding.

We've been on carnival and royal cruises, and from our experience royal wasn't worth the extra cost that they have over carnival. But they do offer the at sea weddings.

So any reviews on your experience would be so helpful and appreciated!

I thought Princess does weddings at sea?

Sent from my Galaxy S4. Typos inevitable.

If you don't mind having to be legally married before your embark you can have a ceremony at-sea with Carnival. We were legally married 12 days before sailing (in order to ensure we had the proper documentation) and then we had our big ceremony and reception on the second sea day of our cruise.

I wrote a review of our experience and it's in my signature. We simply booked a vow renewal and received all of the perks of an embarkation wedding for a fraction of the cost and the captain performed our "symbolic" ceremony in the Chapel on the Pride. We did it this way because all of our guests were sailing (we had 17 guests booked) and we didn't like the "hurry up and wait" mentality that we witnessed on our pre-wedding tour. We loved our wedding and the whole experience and we'd do it again. The overall cost wasn't that bad--I think it was $850 for the ceremony, hour-long reception, and pianist. We spent another $800 on pictures.

I thought Princess does weddings at sea?

 

Sent from my Galaxy S4. Typos inevitable.

I'm just not familiar with princess which is why im not really considering them.

If you don't mind having to be legally married before your embark you can have a ceremony at-sea with Carnival. We were legally married 12 days before sailing (in order to ensure we had the proper documentation) and then we had our big ceremony and reception on the second sea day of our cruise.

 

I wrote a review of our experience and it's in my signature. We simply booked a vow renewal and received all of the perks of an embarkation wedding for a fraction of the cost and the captain performed our "symbolic" ceremony in the Chapel on the Pride. We did it this way because all of our guests were sailing (we had 17 guests booked) and we didn't like the "hurry up and wait" mentality that we witnessed on our pre-wedding tour. We loved our wedding and the whole experience and we'd do it again. The overall cost wasn't that bad--I think it was $850 for the ceremony, hour-long reception, and pianist. We spent another $800 on pictures.

wow thank you so much for that information that is really insightful! im going to take a look at your review, thank you!

We're recently back from our wedding and cruise on the Carnival Pride. It was an embarkation day wedding, but I concur with Carnival Brides that you can do a vow renewal ceremony at sea regardless of how long you are legally married.

Royal requires you to be married at least a year before they let you do a vow renewal. This is pretty jerky of them, as there is a large disparity in prices between the vow renewal and wedding packages. In fact, we found Royal's packages to be ridiculous compared to what Carnival offered, so we went with them.

We were restricted to the Port of Baltimore, and only Royal and Carnival sail out of there, so we didn't look to much into Princess or the other lines. I've heard Princess is the best for weddings.

We HIGHLY recommend a cruise wedding on Carnival for value and quality.

Good luck!

Thanks so much you guys! We picked our cruise last night, end of 2015 to the bahamas on Carnival Ecstasy. Just a quick little cruise so it wont be too expensive on our guests, and we still plan on taking a honeymoon anyways.

It's a 4 night cruise, our tickets will be about $1500. Does anyone think $6000 for everything is a realistic amount?

Thanks so much you guys! We picked our cruise last night, end of 2015 to the bahamas on Carnival Ecstasy. Just a quick little cruise so it wont be too expensive on our guests, and we still plan on taking a honeymoon anyways.

 

It's a 4 night cruise, our tickets will be about $1500. Does anyone think $6000 for everything is a realistic amount?

Maybe for everything but the pictures. We paid more for the pictures than we did for the wedding package :eek: