Ashleigh and Daniel decided to fly themselves and all their loved ones over to Morocco for their October wedding. They opted for the Atlas Mountains and had one hell of a cerebration at L’Amandier Hotel in the Ouirfane Valley, just south of Marrakech. The day after the main event, they hosted a casual BBQ for everyone and the theme was ‘all white’ with everyone dressed head-to-toe in white. They were legally married back when they got back to the UK a week later.

“My husband Daniel and I had zero experience planning weddings when we started our epic journey”, began the bride. “The only reason we even embarked on planning a destination wedding by ourselves is because we were dissatisfied with the way that every venue we approached kept forcing us to choose from a set-menu of pre-packaged options (from flowers to food) that made it impossible to craft our dream day. We were working with a budget below the national average, so getting a wedding planner was never going to be realistic for us, but we still wanted a personalised experience that we could never forget!”

They were mostly inspired by their surroundings for the theme and decor. They made their own favours as well as the seating plan and all the paper goods.

“For us, the core values of our wedding were to have:

1. Key family and friends being able to attend
2. Lots of GOOD food – this may seem obvious, but you’ll be surprised how limited ‘package wedding’ food options can be
3. An intimate, natural setting – we didn’t want a big resort with lots of strangers milling around
4. Authentic charm – in our case we wanted our wedding to have a traditional Moroccan influences
5. Good music and dancing into the night!

Every time we were faced with tough decisions we had these core points to come back to. This made it a lot easier to be decisive and let go of anything that didn’t really serve us.”

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