Teeing Off a Trend: Weddings Away

For only $4,640.42 (taxes included), you can go from bride to golf widow on the same day. Or maybe you and your new husband can just share your mutual passion--for the links, that is.

We’re talking about the new Wedding on the Green deal at the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua on Maui, one of the more unusual among the scores of packages pitched by resorts hoping to land the increasingly lucrative “destination wedding” business (in which couples marry at hotels, and often dozens of wedding guests stay there too).

At the Ritz-Carlton, the package includes three days of golf for two, a room for three nights, a three-course dinner, daily breakfasts and a wedding ceremony at the fifth tee overlooking Oneloa Bay.

At the Amsterdam Hilton in the Netherlands, all you need is love--and about $466--to get married in the very suite where John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono held their “bed-in for peace” protest in 1969. Alas, the bed is not the original.

Geri Bain, travel editor of Modern Bride magazine, said the weddings-away business is “growing really fast.” She attributes it to a desire for more privacy and less hoopla by older first-time marrieds, as well as to the greater acceptability of such weddings. Reader polls showed destination weddings rising from 2% to 4.3% between 1991 and 1995, she said. At Walt Disney World in Florida, such ceremonies are up more than 20% this year.