Wedding Tips: Honeymoon Registry

As I mentioned in this post, more and more couples are creating a Honeymoon Registry instead of a registry strictly for home items. Since B and I have lived together for about 5 years, we don't need every little thing, so a honeymoon registry was a perfect choice for us.

Before starting to look into these registries, I really wasn't sure how it worked. Did we pick activities from a list? How would it know when we need our flights to be? What if we want to do something not listed on the site? Where do I even register for one of these?

So. Many. Questions. But then my sister and MOH found a really great blog post comparing a few of the different honeymoon websites. Some I hadn't found when I googled "honeymoon registry".  So first things first, most sites don't charge you to use them. That being said, most* sites do have some sort of processing fee and an additional percentage fee (varies by site). But who pays for these fees? You actually have the option to let your guests pay for the fees or you can cover them, which ultimately means you get a little bit less from each person.

So how do you pick what you're going to do and how you're going to get there? Most sites have ideas for popular cities and travel destinations, where you can pick from listed ideas. But don't panic if your honeymoon location is not one of those cities. What I've found is these type registries are great for setting up specific things you want or need, your guest "buys it", and you ultimately get the cash to pay for it. What I mean by this is say you would like to set up an item on your registry to pay for you and your honey's flights to and from you honeymoon. So all you would do is find out about how much it would cost, then add a money gift to your registry for that amount. Now flights are pretty expensive, and who's going to want to pay that much an NOT go somewhere? Well that's where group gifting comes in. Most sites allow you to choose if guests need to pay for a whole thing on your registry or if they can contribute to one item. So Auntie Sparkle doesn't have to worry about paying the entire $800 for flights, if all she wants or feels comfortable paying is $100.

B and I ended up signing up with Zola.com which for us has a few more benefits to us than some of the others. First of all, it had the smallest fees we could find, which is important to us. Second, it allows us to upload links to actual websites for other items we may want, but didn't want to make an entire registry at a specific store for. These points, along with the freedom to add whatever we want or need really sold us on using them vs all the other guys.

I don't want to keep rambling on about each honeymoon registry you could find, so I've linked the top 5 to their "how it works" pages, where they of course go into more detail. I also linked Zola's page as well, and it actually compares their fees to some of these other guys.

Zola
Honeyfund
Wanderable
Traveler's Joy
Honeymoon Wishes
Buy Our Honeymoon


Happy Planning!

*I say most because I couldn't find one without these fees, but didn't want to mislead anyone if there is one out there*