When planning your Palm Beach wedding, you are bound to love getting all the fun details confirmed. From flowers to lighting to décor, these are the details that you and your guests will both appreciate. So it’s easy to forget about the wedding day timeline.
However, your wedding day timeline is the most crucial part of your wedding day. The timeline lists out all the logistics for your wedding day. Having a well-crafted wedding timeline can make the difference between you being relaxed and enjoying the moment or you running late and feeling frantic.
We want you to have a great wedding day, so here are some tips for creating your Palm Beach wedding timeline. If you need some help in creating a wedding day timeline, we suggest contacting one of our awesome Palm Beach wedding planners.
1. Start at the Beginning
When constructing the wedding timeline, consider that the ones primarily using the timeline are your vendors. So you will need to start your timeline from the very beginning of the day, from when vendors are able to start loading in. This will give you a clear understanding about when major events in the day are happening.
2. Include Contact Info
It’s essential for all your vendors to have the contact info for the person that will be coordinating your wedding day. This person needs to be someone that is not in the wedding party and that doesn’t need to be in pictures, since this person will be working with the vendors throughout the day. We suggest hiring a professional Palm Beach wedding coordinator to handle this so that all your guests can relax.
3. Load-In Timing
Most weddings can take anywhere between 2-4 hours to set up, sometimes more. Talk to your venue about specific load-in times so you can work with your vendors to space out the arrivals. Between the caterer, the rentals, the décor and the entertainment, you could have upwards of 15 people trying to all load-in at the same time. Spacing out the arrivals can avoid some major chaos.
4. Breakdown Timing
Does anyone truly enjoy cleaning up after the party? Probably not, but it’s a necessary evil. Most weddings can be cleaned up in 1 hour (sometimes more). Some venues have very specific breakdown times; whether it’s because of your contract or because they scheduled a cleaning crew. Discuss the venue’s timing expectations and communicate those to your vendors. Include the “must be out” time on your wedding day timeline to remind vendors of this important detail.
5. Travel Time
Traffic is an unpredictable beast, especially in Palm Beach County. Sometimes it can take you 10 minutes to get to your designated location and other times it can take 45 minutes. Avoid that headache by working in travel time into your wedding timeline.
Take a day to do a trial run of travel times. If you are scheduled to leave the salon at 11am on Saturday to head to the ceremony, time the drive on a Saturday at 11am. Do the same for all other routes being taken that day. Then add 20 minutes to that time as a buffer in case you are running late or hit unexpected delays.
Also, research if there are any major events happening on your wedding day that could shut down roads (ie: marathons, parades, sporting events, etc). That way you can come up with an alternative route. Check out this article on some of the Major Events that happen in Palm Beach County throughout the year.
6. Sunset
Golden Hour is the magical hour before the sun dips behind the horizon and the lighting is incredible! Make note of the time of sunset (there’s tons of websites, but this one’s our favorite), so that you can get some glorious portraits at that time. This is also a crucial bit of information if your ceremony and/or reception are happening outdoors.
Please remember that your wedding day timeline is a guideline, not a set-in-stone document. As long as you start and end on time, everything in between is fluid. An awesome Palm Beach wedding planner can help keep track of your wedding timeline!
