How much does a wedding planner in India cost?

Hey, how much a wedding planner charges in India

Your heart is fixed upon India and your mind is wondering about how do I go ahead and plan my wedding in India. In situations like these, it is better to turn on to experts. We reckon you hire a destination wedding planner, need we say a good one and you are sorted. Yes, we know hiring a wedding planner is a herculean task, more so hiring the right one. That calls for a separate story/ blog post in itself. (You may read about tips on how to choose the destination wedding planner). Right now it is about how much a wedding planner charges for planning your destination wedding in India.

Does a Wedding Planner do everything like running errands or so!

Before answering the question how much a wedding planner charges, let me give you a little background to help you understand better.

In India, most of the wedding planning is done in-house. The uncles and aunts and friends take care of the various chores and generally (almost 80%) couples don’t hire a wedding planner. They just hire a florist, wedding decorator, light guy, DJ, caterer and sometimes a wedding stylist. The concept of hiring a wedding planner who plans and coordinates your whole wedding from A to Z is still relatively novice.

Most planners here, unless they are destination wedding planners, don’t work like how wedding planners work in UK or USA or Canada or Australia. In India, for most of the weddings, all suppliers are hired directly; they come, do their job and get paid. However, as in your country, wedding planner would be one point contact for all suppliers and will arrange for cake tasting, venue recce, linen sampling, the works. The term wedding planner here in India is rather used for a wedding decorator.

My point is you must and should look for a destination wedding planner in India and not just wedding planner in India.

Okay, got that. But how much does a destination wedding planner in India charges?

Coming back to how much does a good destination wedding planner in India costs or charges?

Let’s consider an average destination wedding with upto 100 guests for 2 night events which costs anywhere between 25 lakh to 90 lakh. (For the sake of convenience of calculations, I am not considering here intimate/small weddings or super big fat weddings).

As a thumb rule and industry standard, a wedding planner charges at least 10-15% of your budget which could be generally speaking somewhere between 2.5 lakh to 9 lakh. For the record, I am referring here to your definition of wedding planner i.e. he or she will look after everything viz advising on hotels, working on quotes from different properties, getting you the best deal, sourcing suppliers that fit in your budget as well as meeting up your expectations, coordination and execution of events, guest management and the list goes on.. Keeping in mind how many small small ceremonies and rituals Indian Weddings have with comparatively bigger guests list, it is even more justified!

In India, almost all destination wedding planners work on same lines, i.e., planning the wedding from A to Z and charging a flat fee or an X % of amount depending on scope of work. We charge a flat fee of 2.5 lakh to 4 lakh GBP as per scope of work. For smaller weddings (read 2 to 30 people) we work out an all inclusive wedding package.

Really, this much! What all do you do?

You might be thinking is it really justified to pay this much to a wedding planner. Well, here you will have to allow me to rant a little on behalf of all destination wedding planners. We plan only 8 to 10 weddings an year at the most, that is when we plan to give personalized services and we are on our feet at each wedding with the team and not sending my representative.

Each wedding query starts at least an year in advance and after a long consultation and back and forth of emails (making sure the couple understands us and we understand couple) we freeze the wedding and then again contribute at least 240 or more hours depending on requirements and scope of events.

To give you an aerial view of things: It takes email exchanges ranging from 300 to 1500, 4 to 8 Skype calls, ongoing Whatsapp messages, 1 to 2 reece trips and almost 24 hours onsite for each event to plan a destination wedding in India.

From the tiniest details to the seeming bigger things, we are taking care of everything. Be it the consultation and guidance, venue research and recce, rooms reservations, guests management, look and styling of the events, sourcing MUA or photographers and you name it. And it goes without saying that on the wedding day, we are troubleshooting, handling last-minute details and keeping the event on schedule (yes you read it right, on schedule an Indian Wedding)

Fine then, will take your word for it!

That would be lovely 🙂

Meanwhile you could always get in touch with us and Request for a Consultation and Preliminary Costing for your dream destination wedding in India.

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