Well unfortunately there hasn’t been much progress in the last couple of weeks. I’m still waiting on proposals for decorating (using outside vendors) and still have a lot of unanswered questions. The latest issue is trying to sort out the Welcome Party. The Marriott says they don’t really start planning the wedding details until about three months out which I understand, but we have to get our budget inline. The big wildcards out there are the wedding decor that the Marriott does not provide and how much it will cost us to throw a nice welcome function. (The woman that would be able to answer questions about one of our Welcome Party options is out of the office until August!)

Decor that the Marriott is not able to supply includes the canopy we’d like over our dinner area and the ‘lounge area’ we’d like to have in the reception. If these things are prohibitively expensive with an outside vendor, then we might as well allocate the funds to the Welcome Party. However if they can be done, we may have to trim other areas of our budget. We are now less than 4 months away and I don’t think its unreasonable to expect these questions to be answered by now. Still, I’m trying to be patient.

Of course the easy answer would be to just let Marriott handle all the outside vendors. Will it be worth it to hire my own services? I have absolutely no idea. Of course this is a small island I have to wonder if the same vendors will provide the services whether they are hired by me or the Marriott. Maybe they would rather just work with the hotel? If that’s the case, I wish someone would just say so.