Four messages, at four moments. Get these right and guest logistics stop being your problem.

Twelve months out: the save-the-date

Put the airport name in it. Not the venue name: the airport.

Guests price flights before they think about anything else, and "Dalaman, late September" is a more useful sentence to them than the name of a villa they have never heard of. Half of them will open a flight search within an hour of reading it.

Include: the airport, the month, and roughly how many nights you hope people will stay. Nothing else. This message exists to let people book time off and watch flight prices.

Eight months out: the guest page

One web page, one link, everything on it.

  • Flights. Which airports work, typical journey time, which carriers fly there from where your guests are.
  • Visas. Which nationalities need what. Current position here.
  • The hotel block link. With the rate and the release date stated plainly.
  • An honest indication of cost. What four nights will realistically cost a guest, including flights. Round it up rather than down.
  • The shape of the days. Arrival day, wedding day, anything else you are hosting.

That fourth point is the one couples resist and it is the one that matters most. Being straight about cost early prevents an awkward conversation later, and it gives people who cannot afford it a graceful way to decline while declining is still easy.

Six months out: close the hotel block

Rooms held under your name have a deadline. The ones nobody claimed go back to the hotel and after that your guests pay the public rate, which in August on the Bodrum peninsula is a different number entirely.

Send a reminder two weeks before the release date and then let it go. How blocks actually work.

Six weeks out: the practical page

This is the one guests read. The earlier pages are for planning; this one is for the trip.

  • Transfer times, honestly. Two and a half hours from Dalaman to Kalkan is not a detail to bury.
  • Dress code with a temperature attached. "Smart casual" means nothing. "Smart casual, it will be 31°C at six in the evening and the ground is grass" means something.
  • What happens if it rains, so that nobody spends the morning worrying about it.
  • Who to call on the day: the planner’s number, not yours.
  • What is and is not hosted. If Thursday dinner is on them, say so now.

The one thing never to schedule

Nothing on arrival day.

Guests land hot, tired and late. Flights are delayed, transfers take longer than the map says, and somebody's bag will be on the next plane. A welcome dinner on arrival night is the single most common regret we hear from couples afterwards.

Put the welcome dinner on the second evening. Let people swim, sleep and find their feet on the first.

What to hand off to us

The room block, the transfers and the on-the-day questions. Your guests should be calling the planner rather than the bride on the morning of the wedding, and they will only do that if the number is in front of them.

We build a guest information page for every wedding we run, in the languages your guest list actually reads. You forward one link.

For multi-day celebrations

Everything above, plus a per-day schedule and a transport loop timetable. At a three-day celebration across several venues the difference between a good weekend and a chaotic one is entirely whether guests know where to be and how they are getting there.

A concierge desk in the main hotel lobby for the duration is worth more than any printed schedule.

The two pieces that pair with this

Which airport suits your guest list and how room blocks work.