Press Coverage: HTSI Wedding Special in the Financial Times on Elopements

At the weekend the Financial Times published a "How to get married in 2025" wedding special in the HTSI (how to spend it) magazine.

We were asked about our views on the trend for couples increasingly wanting to elope or have smaller or more intimate weddings.

You can read the article and our quote here.

The elopement diaries - meet the couples who did the big day their way

We thought it might be useful for us to share our full response to the question with our clients and followers through because the topic is actually really interesting and more nuanced than the media or industry have explained so far.

We are seeing lots of clients looking for relaxed and intimate wedding celebrations, and often abroad at destinations that are meaningful or exciting to the couple, but we aren’t experiencing an increase in weddings with less than 60 guests and we still have plenty of larger traditional weddings being produced by our team. 

I think the terminology and interpretation of an elopement has been slightly changed in recent years though, I’ve been hearing them described as smaller wedding celebrations abroad when really they were traditionally considered to be comprised of just the couple with witnesses who have secretly tied the knot and often without parent consent.

We adore creating magical celebrations that have lower guest numbers in creative destinations around the world - we often see couples investing more into guest experiences and bespoke design elements with those weddings, and it opens up so many more venue ideas that may otherwise be unsuitable due to capacity limits. It will often comprise of multiple days of events and activities, creating such gorgeous memories for everyone who attends. 

I was asked specifically if I was experiencing a trend of couples eloping with weddings of five or fewer guests at places like New York City Hall, Vegas or Gretna Green. The honest answer is that I’m just not seeing it at all and I think it’s got media hype around it in the same way micro weddings did during Covid. There will always be some people who chose to celebrate love in that way, but anecdotally and via all my supply chains it's not a new way of doing weddings that is taking off at the moment.

What I am seeing is a lot of people calling a smaller destination weddings (50-100 guests) an elopement, or couples doing an elopement in the traditional sense with just a couple of witnesses for the paperwork part - but without the secrecy -and then planning a larger party with family & friends to follow, having personalised vows and a private celebrant, in the location of their choice around the world without worrying about legal restrictions on marriage. 

I think the drive is not that people are shunning a larger wedding or suddenly getting hitched without parents knowing… it’s more that they want flexibility and out of the box ideas, and they want it to be meaningful as an experience. Which is just so different to older generations expectations of a wedding which are more grounded in tradition and family values. 

Partly this is being driven by social media, but also just a different attitude to life generationally. Weddings are expensive, couples are increasingly funding their own nuptials, and so of course they want to do it there way and truly make it unforgettable. 

For me the story being perpetuated across wedding blogs and media internationally is way more interesting than “couples don’t want big expensive weddings” .

In fact, it's a really cool shift in that couples are doing things their own way again and excites me about the range and style of celebrations we will be able to create in experiences for couples and their guests. If you think about it, this all makes sense as couples now will have travelled more and have friendship circles more internationally than ever before.

It’s not about the money and savings to be made, it’s about the meaning and experience and value they get.