About this item
Ten years ago, when Sandy Malone was planning her Caribbean destination wedding, there was no Pinterest, no Instagram, and no Wedding Wire. The Knot and the Wedding Channel were in their infancy. And Malone was planning her wedding from scratch. The tips and advice in How to Plan Your Own Destination Wedding will help brides and grooms navigate the murky waters of destination-wedding planning - and they are murky because most do-it-yourself brides and grooms are looking to do something "different" from what all of their friends have done before them. Unfortunately, the more remote, bizarre, and challenging the destination is, the more attractive it appears to the do-it-yourself couple. That's where Sandy Malone, star of Wedding Island (TLC) , who has been planning weddings for ten years, comes in. She offers advice to brides and grooms on how NOT to spend money on things they don't need to invest in, and where they DO need to spend money to make sure the event runs smoothly. She also gives tips on how to negotiate the contract with the venue, the "wetiquette" of invitations for destination weddings, finding and handling vendors abroad, and much more. This book offers the complete guide to destination weddings, by a true expert!
About the Author
Sandy Malone is the owner of Sandy Malone Weddings & Events, a full-service traditional and destination wedding planning company, and Do-It-Yourself wedding planning consulting service for DIY brides and grooms based in the Washington, DC area. Sandy is the star of TLC's reality show "Wedding Island," about her destination wedding planning company Weddings in Vieques, based seven miles off the coast of Puerto Rico.
She is an internationally syndicated wedding blogger for The Huffington Post and BRIDES, as well as a reality-TV blogger for Monsters and Critics. Her blogs also appear frequently on the HuffPost's Business and Entertainment pages, and on a number of other high-level wedding sites. She's a regular guest on a number of radio shows, and has a podcast titled "Wedding Reality Check with Sandy Malone" that posts every Tuesday and Thursday, offering real-life, unedited advice on wedding planning dos and don'ts.
Sandy and her team (including her husband Bill, a retired SWAT team commander) have planned and executed more than 500 weddings in the United States and the Caribbean. Sandy is a veteran event planner from Washington, DC, with years of experience planning large and small weddings, press conference, and corporate and political events. She has planned countless events on Vieques Island, beginning with her own wedding back in 2004. Since that time, her professional staff has executed large and small weddings of all styles, including elopements, vow renewals and fabulously posh events at multi-million dollar waterfront villas. She has also planned family reunions, destination baby showers, corporate retreats and a variety of other events for clients from all over the United States and Canada.
Sandy has a BA in Journalism from The Ohio State University, and is a proud Buckeye fan, although she will work with brides from Michigan if they're especially nice. She and Bill, and their dog Houdini, bounce back and forth between their homes in Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, when she's not traveling someplace else fabulous for weddings.
