Guide · · 5 min read
The welcome guide your guests will actually read
What to put in a destination-wedding guest guide, what to leave out, and how to get people to open it before they land.
Diego Ferrer · Guest Experience Lead
Every destination celebration produces a guide. Most of them are twenty pages long, beautifully designed and unread. After four thousand airport pickups, here’s what we’ve learned actually gets opened.
Lead with the four questions everyone has
- Do I need a passport? Yes, valid for the dates of travel. No visa for U.S. citizens.
- How do I get from the airport to the hotel? Tell them exactly. “A driver holding an Altamar sign will meet you outside customs” beats a paragraph about taxi options.
- Can I drink the water? At the hotel, yes. Elsewhere, bottled. Say it plainly.
- What do I wear? Give them the dress code for each event and a note on the terrain: “the ceremony is on sand” changes people’s shoes.
Then the schedule, one page, biggest type on the page
Day, time, event, location, dress code, how you get there. Nothing else. Put this page under every hotel door on arrival day too.
Then the useful, skimmable stuff
Currency and tipping in three sentences. Two or three restaurant recommendations for the free evening, with a note on booking. A phone number that a human answers. The pharmacy. The pool hours.
Leave out
The love story (they know it), the full vendor list (nobody cares yet), the history of the town (save it for the dinner toast). Every extra page makes the important pages harder to find.
How to get it opened
Send it three times: as a link on the website when invitations go out, as a PDF ten days before travel, and as a WhatsApp message with the schedule page as an image the morning of departure. The third one is the one people read.
