Are you considering an all inclusive wedding plan?

All inclusive wedding packages could save you many hours of work by letting your hotel or resort do all the planning for you.

More brides and grooms are choosing all inclusive wedding packages. With today's busy lifestyles, and tough financiall times, buying a complete wedding package starts to sound very attractive.

From the Photographer's perspective.....
The all inclusive package plan is an obvious time saver for most of the things involved in planning a wedding, but it's not always perfect.

I have personally encountered one drawback to this system. Some of the hotels and planners that put together packages such as this will be receiving a kick-back from each of the vendors that they use for your wedding. This is not necessarily a bad thing and most vendors will gladly pay it simply because of the large volume of work they can recieve from being included in these packages, and the fact that they get the work with no advertising efforts of their own. (I wish I could get more work like this)

Here's the catch.... Let's say you purchase an all inclusive wedding package and it comes complete with the photographer who will shoot for several hours and present you with a selection of perhaps 100 small prints. (this is an example only) So you look online and either the work is substandard, or awful, or not shown at all. If you're serious about your wedding photos (which I'll assume you are if you're looking at my site) then you may not want to settle for anything less than the best photographer you can possibly afford.

Ok, so now you ask if you can cut out the all inclusive package photographer and bring your own photographer.

The response you get will obviously varry but I have experienced many times when the hotel putting the package together flatly refused to allow the bride to substitute outside vendors - at all. I've seen brides get so frustrated with this that they cancelled their all inclusive package and moved their wedding elsewhere.

I've also seen hotels that told the bride it would cost her an additional $500 to cut out their package photographer and bring in someone else.

These problems are the result of the fact that (sometimes - but not always) the all inclusive package saves you money by transferring some of your costs onto each of the vendors that are required to pay the hotel a percentage of their profits in order to be included in the package. The hotel makes out great, while the vendors get a cut in pay. If the hotel were not so greedy, and simply gathered everyone together to make things easier on you, then the system would indeed be perfect. But the hotel may be relying on the income from the vendors to turn a profit on your wedding. This allows them to lower the price they offer to you (which makes them more competitive with the other hotels) and then they can make up the difference by charging the vendors more to participate in the package. When you ask to cut out one of the bigger vendors, the hotel stands to lose enough money that the whole thing may no longer be profitable for them.

My advice....

Make sure to check with the hotel or coordinator who is putting your all inclusive plan together to see if you can make substitutions to the plan if you want to. If they are truly working in your best interest, they should have no problem with this request and it should not cost you anything extra, in fact, if you are trading out one of their services for something you've found on your own, they should privide a price reduction if anything.

If your hotel is providing a wedding package that seems too cheap to be true, then you can expect to lose some flexibility in return.