Destination Weddings Are Moving Closer to Home

Before the invitation to Jessica Bartlett and Brody DeBrino’s spring wedding in Italy even arrived, Adeline Perez knew she and her husband, Max, would likely have to decline.

The decision wasn’t easy. The couple are close friends with Bartlett and DeBrino, but they were saving for a down payment on the house they recently moved into in Paso Robles, Calif. “I had to be realistic about it,” Perez said. The cost of travel “really would have set us back.”

Bartlett, 29, of Boca Raton, Fla., had expected a raft of regrets. “I thought, if people choose not to come, it won’t hurt my feelings,” she said. But before invitations went out, she and DeBrino began reaching out to the people they most wanted to celebrate with and quickly heard that the trip to Italy would be difficult for some. Knowing that guests, including Perez and her husband, wanted to attend and might not be able to, prompted the couple to reconsider their plans.

Instead of exchanging vows in either Lake Como or the Amalfi Coast as they had planned, Bartlett and DeBrino booked an April wedding at Sunstone Winery in California’s Santa Ynez Valley. The Perezes were thrilled to attend.

Stateside weddings may be having a moment. After all, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce recently married in New York City. And despite the cavalcade of moguls and celebrities who have held lavish nuptials in Europe in recent years, wedding planners are sensing a cool-down in the rush to marry in quaint corners of foreign countries.

“Couples are doing their research and deciding, OK, we’re going to stay home,” said Rumaiza Ali, the founder of Wedy, an online wedding marketplace and business software platform. Modern-day travel nightmares, including flight cancellations, soaring fares and border restrictions, account for some of the swing toward staying close to home. But accommodating guests’ day-to-day lives is a more important factor, experts say.

Kim Goldstein, the president of the travel company Journeys, said 65 to 75 percent of guests don’t make it to European destination weddings. According to “Weddings: Putting a Price on Love,” a publication Bank of America Institute released in June, only about a third of guests are excited about traveling internationally for a wedding. Another 10 percent are relieved they can decline without guilt, said Taylor Bowley, an economist at the institute.

“Couples are saying, ‘It’s asking a lot for someone to fly across the world for me,’” Ali said. “‘So we’ll make the dream happen here.’”

“Here” can mean anywhere a passport is not required. Fora, a travel platform, reported that more than half of its advisers saw a spike in U.S. destination weddings from last year, with Las Vegas, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and South Carolina among couples’ top picks.

“It’s quite a large spike, to be honest,” said Henley Vazquez, a founder of Fora, with popular wedding hotel bookings in the United States growing at twice the pace of popular wedding hotels overseas. In a 2026 travel trends report, Honeyfund, an online cash registry, found that 31 percent of weddings are destination events; two-thirds of those happen domestically.

Domestic weddings, though, can sometimes require deeper pockets because vendor costs are higher and the guest count ticks up, as Bartlett found. Her April 18 wedding was attended by 125; for the Italian wedding she was banking on about 50.

In California, “everything cost significantly more,” Bartlett said, adding that the wedding she was gathering estimates for in Italy would have cost half as much.

Sparing guests the time and expense of getting to Europe appealed to Morgan Murray, 33, and Symoné Berry, 35, an Atlanta couple who made a last-minute decision to elope in Las Vegas last November.

“We didn’t want people to have to pay an arm and a leg,” to travel to the wedding they initially planned on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, said Murray, a nurse practitioner and content creator who goes by Morgan SanDiego and whose followers watched the change of plans develop online. Also, “logistically, it was a lot for our friends and families,” she said. Several had limited paid time off. Others had inconsistent child care.

For some couples, especially those with older parents or grandparents, rethinking a wedding in a foreign country is more about medical concerns than bank accounts and schedules.

The beauty influencer Marjan Tabibzada, 30, and her husband, Nomaan Vadria, 32, who split their time between Los Angeles and Atlanta, had already put deposits down on a venue in Lake Como for their fall 2025 wedding when the logistics started feeling too complicated, and the health of Vadria’s father left them uncertain if he could make the trip. So they instead held their September wedding for 200 at the Four Seasons in Westlake Village, Calif.

Before the switch, “Lake Como felt incredibly romantic to us,” Tabibzada said. “But having our family there was always going to be more important.”

Michelle Rago, the founder of Michelle Rago Destinations, whose weddings typically carry a $1.5 million minimum price tag, estimated that 60 percent of her weddings happen in Europe or the Caribbean. The 40 percent that take place in the United States are no less lavish, and have included ranch buyouts in the Midwest and Aspen, Colo.

Massachusetts’s Nantucket island, Rago said, “is a world-class destination, and the Eastern Seaboard couldn’t get any prettier.” She recommends the Aman resort in Utah for scenery, Manhattan for glamour and California’s Napa Valley for a European feel.

“When it comes to service and food, it’s hard to measure up to Europe,” she conceded. But wherever the wedding is held, “the focus is on having guests feel delighted,” she said.

Wedding guests may be more likely to attend when they are not overwhelmed by expenditures, a scenario that can be especially hard to avoid when multiple far-flung invitations arrive in a single season.

In recent years, the destination wedding pile-on “has happened a lot,” Ali said. “Let’s say you’re spending $5,000 to go to each one, it becomes a huge financial commitment.”

“A new etiquette is forming,” she added, with renewed enthusiasm for keeping logistics simple and close to home.