Maui Weddings Price Increase

Book your wedding at 2005 prices, before they go up. This is just a quick note to let you that we will be raising our prices soon. If you want to save some money, we recommend that you try to do your Maui wedding planning soon, as we are planning to raise our prices and put them up on our website during the last week in February. Weddings booked before those changes will only pay the old price.

If you have done any comparative shopping on the web, you have probably already noticed that the Maui Me Wedding Package prices are quite reasonable when compared to what our competitors are charging. What we offer for the price is a company with 7 years experience with over 1200 weddings performed, a Better Business Bureau membership, and a fun attitude. But, due to the demand for our service, and increased expenses that we're facing, we feel that we must raise our prices.

If you want to see our current package prices, click on the title of this article. We'll announce our new prices right here in my blog.

Susan

A Surprise Maui Wedding

Last night we performed a wedding on the beach for a fun young couple named Lyndon and Jennifer. This wedding was unique in that the bride did not know she was getting married -- two days before the ceremony. I always love watching a man do something really romantic like this, planning the entire wedding without her even knowing . . .

In the past, we actually did a wedding where the bride surprised the groom at the last moment. He didn't have a clue what was up until she took him to the wedding license officiant. Its always interesting for us, as Maui wedding planners, when we do a wedding like this. What happens if the bride-to-be says "no!" And they have to cancel at the last second??

Lyndon called me about three weeks ago and told me what he was doing. Its always fun to see a romantic groom. He wanted to surprise her and so we talked over all the details of what they wanted. Hair and make-up for his bride; a wedding cake; a bouquet; photography. The biggest problem I think they encountered was the last minute shopping for Jennifer's wedding dress. But the bride did look radiant dressed in white with lavender flowers in her hair that matched their leis.

Hawaii weddings are so often more romantic then mainland nuptials just because, with a smaller party (sometimes consisting of only the wedding couple), they can concentrate more on doing all those little things that make the day memorable. With a big wedding, the couple usually has so many things to think about, including keeping everyone happy, and that's usually not a the case here with our Maui weddings.

Lyndon and Jennifer are from Texas. We always like to ask the couple how they met as we've heard such incredible romantic stories. They've been together a year and Jennifer simply did not know, when she stepped on the airplane in Texas that she was on her way to a storybook Maui wedding.

Congratulations you guys!

I'll be posting a photo of the couple so you can see what their private, romantic Maui wedding looked like as they stood on the soft sand and watched a glorious Makena sunset.

Susan

Maui Horse and Carriage Wedding

This week we will be performing a wedding at the Renaissance in Wailea. This one will be very unique because the bride and groom have chosen to arrive in a beautiful horse and carriage. Normally only available up on the west side, we've arranged to have this beautiful white carriage and its large elegant horses come down to Wailea for this special wedding.

I'll keep you posted about this wedding later in the week and will put up some pictures for you.

Susan

Private Maui Wedding Sites

Hi, I'm Susan, and I want to tell you that we're working hard to come up with new private Maui wedding sites.

A private Maui wedding site offers some unique features that you won't get at a public location (like the beach). Private locations are reserved, just for you, so you know that you won't be beat out by someone else getting to the site first. You can also often have alcoholic beverages at a private site (although this is not a given), but you can never have alcohol at the beach because their is a big fine if you do.

But the problem we face is that there are less and less private Maui wedding sites available. We've had to drop several sites from our website over the past year as they have become unavailable. There are so many restrictions from the County and the neighbors and other issues that have come up so that quality sites are just getting harder and harder to find.

Recently, I had a couple come in from the mainland who wanted a private site. They booked my time and I took them to several existing sites, as well as some new sites that I had been working on finding. It takes a lot of footwork, tag telephone conversations, and meetings to nail down some of the newer wedding location sites.

We will be adding photos of these new sites soon. I'll keep you posted.

Subscribe to Maui Wedding Planner by Susan

We now have a RSS feed for Maui Wedding Planner by Susan so that our couples can subscribe to our blog and keep informed as to what's happening on this site. This Maui Wedding Planner blog is designed to give you up-to-date information about Maui weddings. Whenever we add new pages on our main website or new blog posts, such as a new features, we'll put it all right here.

For example, we're calling "Romantic Maui Wedding Stories", you will be able to find out about it in this blog. You can click on the title of this blog article or you can click on the orange button below My Profile and it will take you to the RSS sign-up page.

That link will take you to a page which gives you a choice of Internet vehicles for receiving your blog feeds. You can receive it on your personalized Google page or if you click on "show all subscribe options" you can receive it through My Yahoo or Feeddemon or Bloglines or any of the other feed services now available.

If you are new to the world of blogs, you should know that signing up for one of these free feeds can save you a tremendous amount of time. You can receive a moment-by-moment listing of a wide variety of blogs on just about any subject that interests you. And each day you can see what new posts have been made and their titles, so you can decide if they are something you want to read about.

If you are thinking about having Maui Me do you Maui Wedding, this is a good way to keep up with what's happening with us. When our prices change, this is where it will appear first. We will be letting our couples know here so that they can make certain they don't wait too long before they book. So sign up to receive our feed today. And of course, it's FREE.

If you've already booked your wedding with us, it is a great idea to get our feed for Maui Wedding Planner by Susan. This will keep you up-to-date on what we're doing, as well as letting you read about other couples and their romantic stories. (Which will help you get more excited as your own wedding day approaches).

Susan

Maui Beach Weddings

Let's talk about the most popular place for a Maui wedding -- the beach. All of the beaches in Maui are considered public. Even though this is true, there are many beaches to which the public cannot get access, (unless they arrive by boat) because there is no access to the beach.

When the large resorts were built, the County usually required the developers to provide "access" to the beaches through their property. Usually a sign is posted indicating that public access is possible (or not possible) through a given corridor. If you know where these access points are located, you can often find beaches that are hidden behind a hill full on condos or hotels. This, of course, is what your Maui wedding planner should already have done: find the hidden beaches that you can use for your weddings.

What makes a good wedding beach?

We have a list of things that we use to determine which beaches are best. Is it normally crowded? There are many beautiful beaches like Kaanapali Beach which look at Coney Island on most days. Too many hotels on a beach will result in crowding, lots of running kids, snorkelers, etc. A wedding is best on a quiet, uncrowded beach.

Is the beach windy? There are many beautiful Maui beaches that are windswept most of each day. The north side of Maui has the best windsurfing beach in the world. That should tell you that you don't want to get married there. Maui has this condition as well on the beaches on the west side up near the Ritz Carlton, such as Ironwood or DT Fleming. We've have couples insist on having their wedding ceremony on some of these beaches (despite our warnings) and they usually find out the hard way what high winds can do their hair and putting sand in the air.

Will the beach have rain? When you are getting married on a beach, you can never be sure what you will get. But all of the Hawaiian islands have the same basic wind patterns. Most of the time, the tradewinds come in from the north so all beaches on the north and eastern sides of the islands will have to contend with this. The leeward side, or the south side of the island is where you'll find the least amount of rain. This is why we recommend that couples travel to a south Maui beach because the odds are in favor that they won't encounter a lot of rain.

We estimate that a third of the weddings we do on the west side of Maui will receive some rain, simply because it rains there more than on the south side. Couples often want to be married on the west side because it is close to their condo or hotel, and everything can go perfectly. But when it does rain, it can fog up camera and video lenses making it more difficult to get good quality images. I know of some photographers who will just not do weddings on the west side simply because they don't want to risk damaging their expensive cameras.

We have been doing weddings on the beach for seven years now, and we come prepared. We have small and large umbrellas. And we pick our beaches carefully, always watching the conditions as we are driving to the Maui beach wedding site to make certain that we won't run into problems. If we have a videographer or a minister at another beach, we often are in contact via cell phone to see what conditions are like down or up the coast if rain clouds are in the air.

We also have a back up plan if a large storm is due. We have back-up locations where we can stand up the eves of a restaurant, or in a covered gazebo just in case we need it. This is very important to use because we always want to be prepared. Sometimes the best solution to a little rain is just to wait until it stops. We have had very few weddings that could not be done because of weather, which is pretty amazing when you're talking about 1200 weddings over seven years.
Will a Maui beach site photograph well? This is something that many Maui wedding planners don't consider. There are a number of very popular beaches that my husband John really dislikes. He is very into things like the angle of the beach toward the setting sun, the presence of one or more palm trees to frame his pictures, a rocky outcropping to place the couple up against, etc. These are things that most wedding planners and certainly most couples don't think about or factor in to their choice of a beach because they are unable to compare the various beaches side-by-side. We definitely prefer some of our beaches because they are easier to photograph.

For all of these reasons, we recommend that couples consider coming to south Maui for their Maui beach wedding. You may have a great experience in another area of the island, but the odds favor south Maui. We always make recommendatioins to our couples based upon our experience, but then the final decision is up to them. (That's why we have experience of beaches that we don't enjoy!).

Whatever Maui beach you choose for your wedding, the odds are you'll have a great romantic experience because there is no place on earth quite like Maui!

Why Have A Maui Wedding?

It seems that many people have never thought about Maui as a place where they can get married. Generally, couples think of Hawaii as a destination for their honeymoon, not a site for their wedding. But that perception is changing. Each year the number of weddngs in Hawaii increases, and Maui consistently leads all of the other islands in the chain. Maui sees almost 50 percent of all the tourist weddings performed in Hawaii.

My name is Susan and together with my husband John, we have been planning and performing weddings on Maui for 7 years now. Maui is a great choice because you can get married right on a sandy beach year round. Weddings on Maui can be very romantic.

Maui has been voted "Best Island in the World" for 12 years in a row by the readers of the Conde Nast Traveller Magazine. Why is it so popular with tourists? We have the best beaches in Hawaii, great activities and sites to see, good quality air, limited traffic congestion, and lots of open space.

Often couples will come to Maui and it just feels so romantic so they pick up the phone and call us: "Can we get married tomorrow?" We received a call like that just two days ago. Rick and Melissa from the San Francisco Bay area called up and booked their last second wedding. My husband John, performed the wedding on a beautiful beach down in Makena on the south side of the island.

After the simple wedding (which included just the two of them), Rick commented about the words John used in his ceremony. "We both smiled when you said that part about accepting each other as you are. I've said that to Melissa many times. That was just 'us'."

(NOTE: Rick & Melissa read this post and added some personal comments on their own above. Click on Comments, for the last article, above, to read them).

Because John is both a minister and a professional photographer, he also took some photographs of this couple's last second wedding. It's so much fun for us to help create a romantic atmosphere for our couples. Maui's great weather, the palm trees hanging over the ocean, the incredible colors of the sunset on the horizon and the smell of flower leis all contribute to the romantic atmosphere. No matter how big the wedding, we like to encourage the couple to stand there for a few intimate moments, or walk down the beach hand-in-hand, savoring the emotion of their day.

So often our couples tell us, "our wedding was beyond what we had imagined it could be." We love to hear those words. And I must admit, we do have a lot of "secrets" about how to plan our weddings here in paradise that will help you plan your own Maui wedding. There are definitely things you want to think about and plan for before you come here.

As we build the number of posts to this blog, feel free to put your comments or questions after any article. We want this blog to give you the answers you need so that your wedding can be truly intimate and romantic.

To travel to our Maui Me homepage, and learn more about the wedding services we perform, click on the following link: http://maui-me.com

Maui Wedding Locations

To get married in Hawaii, you will want to find and select one of our great Maui wedding locations. As a Maui wedding planner I would guess that we coordinate around four percent of our weddings indoors, as in a Maui wedding chapel or church. Of the other 96 percent of our weddings, the vast majority of our ceremonies take place at a Maui beach wedding site. But we also do private and resort sites as well as gardens and water falls.

In most parts of the world, you wouldn't dare try to plan an outside wedding a good part of the year -- especially in the winter. Hawaii is unique round

If you're on a limited budget, or your party is small, a Maui beach wedding is probably a good idea to consider. The prices is right, and there are a lot of beaches to choose from. That, of course, can be a challenge if you've never been here, finding a beach that is pleasant with good weather, few tourists or locals around, and which is easy to get to. Because finding a good beach site can be an art, I'll be adding a lot of posts about different sites in the future.

One thing that I would encourage you on, get help from a Maui wedding planner who has some experience. All of the beach sites have a "history." By that I mean, good and bad things happen consistently at different sites and it is wise to know if an area has a good (or bad) history before you bring your wedding to that location. Because we've seen so many of these beaches at various times of the day and under various conditions, we definitely have preferences as to WHY you don't want to go to certain popular wedding beaches. But more about that later.

Maui waterfalls are of interest to many couples. There are many, many waterfalls on Maui; unfortunately, most of them are inaccessible or involve such a long drive that you won't find many Maui wedding planners willing to travel to them. Your choices are definitely limited. There is one nice private waterfall on the north shore that is worth looking into. And there is the Maui Prince waterfall. But that is man-made and surrounded by the hotel. It is also more expensive.

Maui gardens weddings are quite popular with many coming to Hawaii to get married. With a private garden site you can control your environment and not have to worry about having the kind of problems some public beach weddings may encounter. This is a popular choice and there are several private gardens and free parks to choose from.

Maui wedding chapels and churches represent another choice. They are located all over the island and offer a wide latitude of price and attractiveness. There are not very many dedicated wedding chapels (as opposed to churches). A wedding chapel doesn't have hymn books, communion stains and other signs of regular use like most churches possess; but they cost more.

Many Maui resorts have wedding sites that are available to those staying at the resorts as well as those staying elsewhere. The resorts are more restrictive; they usually demand all food come from their kitchens; some require you use their expensive coordination service; and their sites are generally on the higher end.

Finally, there are private Maui wedding locations. Private homes, golf courses, condos and restaurants all offer sites that can be rented. We have a whole list of sites that we use and which we prefer for our couples because of the ambiance, price and location of these private sites.