How We Safely Honeymooned During COVID!
COVID-19 took a toll on many industries, and among those were events and travel. When you combine changes in both industries for one couple, you get a multitude of stressful moments for an experience that is supposed to be one of the happiest, most relaxing, of one’s life.
Wedding planning is a stressful time for a lot of people and that is why we do what we do – we plan so you don’t have to. However, travel planning, specifically honeymoon planning, is not as common as most may think. Why wouldn’t you hire a wedding planner AND a travel advisor to help enhance your planning experiences? I may have thought differently about this a year ago if I hadn’t just gone through the experience myself!
I got married last December after a crazy amount of changes and curveballs were thrown my way. Wedding planning in a pandemic was no joke, not even for a seasoned wedding planner. I had to re-plan my wedding 3 different times and come the Fall, I was pretty over planning anything and everything that had to do with my own wedding, especially the honeymoon ☺ My husband and I had always dreamt of traveling to Hawaii for our honeymoon, but at the time, Hawaii had a long list of restrictions and required a 14-day quarantine upon arrival, which was not an option for our work schedules. We were frozen in our planning, completely out of creative ideas, and were left wondering whether or not we should even go on a honeymoon.
I remembered stumbling across a modern-day travel agency a few weeks prior and decided to explore the option a little further. I reached out to Bailie White, the owner of BE The Travel, and was immediately met with kindness, empathy, and professionalism. We set up a phone call to discuss her services and our options. After stressfully expressing to Bailie how much we didn’t want to have to plan one more thing, she explained her BE VIP Treatment package to us and we were hooked.
Bailie would be sending us detailed proposals with different options for destinations, accommodations, activities, and more. This package would allow us to give her our payment information so that she could book all of our airfare, transfers, accommodations, reservations, etc. She would organize our travel documents in one customized app, provide us with a detailed itinerary (if we wished) for every day, monitor our trip while we were gone, and so much more. I’m pretty sure Colin and I told her she was hired on that initial phone call – all of this planning and detailed information that I could still receive without having to do much work myself was music to my ears!
After a little back and forth with Bailie, we decided on Jackson Hole, Wyoming for our honeymoon. We stayed in town at Hotel Jackson, we went dog sledding, snowmobiled through the Central Rocky Mountains, ate lunch at the top of the Teton Mountain Range, went on a nature safari, traveled through the Elk Refuge on a sleigh, and even had a relaxing spa day at the Four Seasons.
Bailie kept in touch with us throughout the week in the most perfect, not annoying, way. It was like she knew when to text and when to leave us alone! We sent her a text a couple of days in, asking if she could help us figure out another activity for one of our free days – within an hour she had already texted back with availabilities, pricing, and a restaurant reservation. We were blown away by the service!
“Even if she hadn’t been amazing up until this point, this just made it all worth it and her services were worth every penny.””
As if her impeccable planning prior to the trip and that instance weren’t enough, she really blew us out of the water on our trip home. We had multiple delays leaving Jackson to come home due to the weather. We were anxiously watching the expected arrival time every time the flight got delayed and were very aware of the likely possibility that we’d miss our connection. The airline boarded the plane after what seemed like the last delay, only to deplane us after 30 minutes of sitting on the tarmac. Colin and I realized at that moment that we were not going to make our next flight. We decided we would call the airline when we got back to the airport. Before we even had a chance to sit down and pull our phones out, Bailie had already texted us to let us know that she had been monitoring our flights, had called the airline, had rebooked us on a different flight home, and the confirmation was sitting in our email inbox. Our jaws dropped. We had not been communicating with Bailie that day and had no idea she had been aware of all the changes! I think Colin’s exact words in that moment were, “Even if she hadn’t been amazing up until this point, this just made it all worth it and her services were worth every penny.”
Hiring Bailie and BE The Travel to plan and coordinate our honeymoon was one of the best wedding planning decisions that we made. We were able to fully enjoy our honeymoon the way it was intended and were able to be fully immersed in the trip without getting caught up in the details. This is exactly what we always plan for our wedding planning couples – enjoy your day and let us take care of the details. Wedding planning and honeymoon planning go hand in hand! If you hire one, you should definitely hire the other. After all, don’t you want to look back on your wedding & honeymoon and remember the fun you had and the love you shared, not the stressful moments? ☺
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