Concerned to have to postpone and reschedule your destination wedding. So what now?

Credit by: DavidZ Photography 

You may be browsing the World Health Organisation's dashboard to get a glance at the global situation COVID-19 by countries, territories and areas, and this may bring you, very understandably, to have to postpone and reschedule your destination wedding, So what now? How do you handle the announcement to your guests? Are you concerned to sound too serious or too grave? After all, this are happy celebrations that we are talking about. So how to comply with the seriousness of the situation all the while keeping a lighthearted and subtly festive correspondence style?

Castle Key's team is French mostly from the Loire Valley, Swedish from Stockholm and also Chinese from Hong. Castle Key is a multicultural company based in Sweden operating in France and abroad with a busy clientele based in USA as well as in other parts of the world. We are sensitive to the subtleties that various cultures hold as well as to the multiple individual stand points, a challenge that we personally and professionally enjoy bringing into expressing ourselves in different written and oral communication styles. No need to say that COVID-19 is bringing a lot of new knowledge about the different perspectives thanks to the comments in Facebook's blog-posts (China (front runner, covering up), France (lock down, the exemple) and Sweden (business-as-usual and its hackathon)).

Weddings are very personal and full of emotions but also full of rules of etiquette. Also, when it comes to expressing oneself in the best way possible, we know of the challenges attached to the mission and when it comes to postponing your destination wedding and celebration, you want our message to be clear, efficient yet in line with the sensitivity of the recipient and style reflect your own personal style. So CELEBRATION STYLE or NEUTRAL STYLE?

Credit by: Castle Key 

So, how do you engage the conversation with your guests to let them know that you are considering postponing your event abroad in light of the COVID-19's global turnout? 

We have sampled some suggestions, gathering some thoughts based on personality traits that we know of as well as the seriousness of the reason for postponement. We came up with two styles of text and we hope that they can come up of some us to you.

Their would be different stages as your guests start to either get silent to your attempt of getting in touch with them or, on the contrary, getting more pushy in an attempt of knowing what is your position so that they can take your view into consideration when discussing at home.

DESTINATION WEDDING POSTPONEMENT - INFORMAL STYLE

Dear family, friends, (i.e. your group, network, or individual),

We hope that you are doing as wonderfully as you possibly can in this special time. As a result of the global situation, we have started a conversations about what this may mean for our destination (add here the appropriate term: wedding days, celebrations, else). We are optimist that the situation with COVID-19 could be contained by the end of May 2020 and that the organisation of our event will resume. However, we need to consider not only our personal situation but also the situation of the country hosting our event, as well as your situation, the local venues and the vendors.

We hope to still honour our wedding day and get married on MM DD, YY and celebrate with everyone at our reception on MM DD, YY. In order for us to inform our venue(s) and vendors whether to keep the events of our wedding or postpone, we would be tremendously grateful for you to let us know of a change in your plans. Please respond with one of the following:

• We are all set for celebrating you and love on the DD of MM YYYY , and our flight company allows us for rescheduling if necessary, until the xxx.
• Whichever day and year your wedding and the celebration of the end of COVID-19 will be, we cannot to be there with you all to celebrate.
• What do you think about a winter destination wedding?
• Else (fill in with your inspiration)

We want to reach out to you, and please do reach out to us, may you have any question or be in need of any helps, we would be delighted to have quality time with you via a video-gin-tonic … (fill in with your favorite drink) in virtual meeting (fill in with your program Whatsapp, Skype, …). We have a lot to share together with you and we are very happy to hearing yours too! We would love this to happen on MM DD, YY before HH, are you free on that day and time? We hope so!

With much love!

Bride and groom's names

DESTINATION WEDDING POSTPONEMENT - FORMAL STYLE

Dear family, friends, (i.e. your group, network, or individual),

We hope to still honour our wedding day and get married on MM DD, YY and celebrate with everyone at our reception on MM DD, YY. In order for us to inform our venue(s) and vendors whether to keep the events of our wedding (and/or reception) or postpone, we would be tremendously grateful for you to let us know of a change in your plans. Please respond with one of the following:

• We are all set for celebrating on MM DD, YY

• We wish you nothing but happiness and will celebrate from afar!

We are staying positive by knowing that none of this is within our control. We are grateful that in the middle of a crisis we can take a moment and keep the main part of our wedding vision alive to exchange our vows and start our lives together as one.

If you would please reach out to us no later than MM DD, YY, it will be greatly appreciated.

With much love,

Bride and groom's names

CONFIRMATION OF POSTPONEMENT - FORMAL STYLE

Out of abundance of caution for our loved ones’ health and safety due to the global pandemic, we have made the difficult decision to postpone our wedding to a later date.

We are excited to celebrate with you in the future and will be in touch as soon as we can with our new plans. You can also keep updated by visiting our wedding website (add your Wedding website address here).

CONFIRMATION OF POSTPONEMENT - INFORMAL STYLE

To our loved ones,

Obviously except for anyone living on the moon all of us have been following the news of the coronavirus, all of you have been in some form of lockdown (we still haven’t watched Tiger King yet.. but are guessing those of you with Netflix have).

We’re writing to let you know that after careful consideration we have decided to postpone our wedding until next year.

We hope any of you who’ve already booked flights will be able to change your travel plans.

We look forward to celebrating with you once this is behind us, and will continue to keep in touch with you as our new plans are a little more certain.

Please check our wedding website for updates as we will be posting all new information there. And please don’t inject yourselves with disinfectant!

Love,

Bride & Groom

DESTINATION WEDDING POSTPONEMENT - ADD ON

Ideally you would give them three options of days and times so that they are most likely to find one that suit their schedule without having to revert back to you with additional question. The time and the subject are serious and they either be in need of relaxed times or of seriousness. 

If necessary, you would send a separate email for your guests attending the second event schedule at another location and date. 

We help you with your correspondance from the beginning, by the unplanned events, until day after the realisation of your event. Castle Key Destination Weddings | just.ask@castlekey.com | +33 6 47 35 67 42 (WhatsApp too).