It is very rare and probably never happened before that I have posted such a blog post but I am so angered by this situation so here it is in black and white and for everyone to read in the big wide world of the internet in the hope that word gets out and about of this utterly ruthless couple who are currently plaguing and taking the piss our of our wedding world.  Excuse my French!

Our Wedding World, as we like to call it here, is a very close knit community.  All the venues and suppliers know each other and we are like one big family, with a few exceptions, and we look out for each other.

Together, with Lucy from Boutique Weddings, one of my good friends, we set up a closed Facebook group about 2 years ago,  purely for all the wedding suppliers here in Southern Spain.

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I often wonder where the busy summer months go and of course in the winter we do slow down, but ever so slightly as there is always so much to catch up on.

So what do wedding planners get up to in the winter!

I thought it would be a nice idea to write a little blog post about what we have been up to and give our readers a little insight into our lives.

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As we head towards the autumn here now in Spain and start to quieten down, there is nothing nicer than receiving a thank you and we have been spoilt already this week with two :)! (more…)

Here in Spain there are a wealth of fabulously talented wedding suppliers, from planners, stylists, photographers, caterers, entertainers, you name it we are brilliant at it!

We live, eat, sleep weddings and love our jobs, nurture our businesses and all work extremely hard throughout the year, often in very high temperatures, to produce fabulous events for couples travelling into Spain from all over the world. 

Clients come from the UK, US, Ireland, Dubai, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong to name but a few, in fact Spain is now so popular and such a central location with almost year round wonderful weather that the wedding industry has rocketed here in the past 3 years.

The average wedding planner will work on about 30 weddings each year, catering companies maybe double or more. Entertainers, florists, musicians, cake designers and packaged venue weddings can do up to 100 weddings each year.  We are all busy and love it!

Now some advice for couples wishing to get married in Spain 🙂

Firstly we want to help you, we want to create your dream wedding in Spain, find you the perfect venue and advise and assist as much as we can before you take the plunge.

Planning a wedding abroad can be a daunting prospect but we are all good at it, all of our clients come from abroad, it is our business, destination weddings, and here is how you can make your initial enquiry easier for us to respond to.

Email us with plenty of time before you decide to visit us.

Tell us what your ideal wedding is, location, number of expected guests and ideal budget you have to spend.  None of our weddings are factory led and we create dream days according to what our clients want.  

This cannot be factored and shoe horned into a package.  

If you want a 3 day wedding in the fabulous city of Seville or a relaxed stylish beach wedding we need to send you relevant up to date information including the following:

What venues are available on your dates.
The most up to date and latest prices for each service you require.
A true budget outline as to what to expect your ideal day to cost.
The pros and cons of each venue, we offer transparent advice to our clients.

We offer a pre-wedding consultancy service to do just this for you.

Yes we can send you generic and general information but if you wish us to work for you and provide all the information I have listed above this takes time.  

Time is something I have to pay my team for but it is worth it as you will receive personalised up to date information designed for you with your ideal day set out and if you are planning a visit, a personalised itinerary.

So here is my list of what not to do if you are planning a wedding in Spain :)!

1. Don’t rock up here in Spain, trawl through the internet for wedding planners in Spain, find us, email us and expect us to be available at the drop of a hat, we are busy.  

I have had two emails this week from potential clients who have arrived in Spain and have decided only now to contact planners asking to see venues this weekend?!

We have a wedding this weekend and pre-booked clients visiting us so this is a complete impossibility to even begin to prepare anything in that time frame, let alone organise a venue viewing trip for you which let’s face it is not going to be any good if we managed anything.  

We need time and a lot of effort on our part to make sure your trip here is worthwhile.  

You have paid for your flights over here and no doubt accommodation so why leave such an important thing as a last minute fly by night decision?   

It is always heart breaking for us not to be able to jump into action and answer every query we have because the couple have left it to the last minute to get organised.

2. Don’t approach wedding suppliers and expect them to be available to meet with you if you have not booked them.  

Every supplier again gets about 8 to 10 enquiries a day, many of the enquiries they will never hear from again so don’t ask them to pop by and meet you on a Sunday afternoon an hour away from where they are based.  If they did this for every email they receive you can only begin to imagine how chaotic their lives would be!!

Having had an ever so slightly tiny deep sigh moan on my personal page about this, this week I got many messages from wedding suppliers sending me impossible requests from potential clients.

One that stood out was a cake maker, and a very popular one who is already practically booked out for 2016.  A potential client had just arrived in Spain, was around on Sunday and would love to meet with her……she has two weddings, a family and her husband gets one day off a week which ironically is a Sunday….I say no more!

3. Check out our busy times.

Our wedding season starts usually from April through to October, the months of May, June, July and September are bonkers, we are literally running from wedding to wedding.  
Here in Spain being a destination wedding country weddings are not nicely spaced out to one every Saturday, some suppliers are completing 7 or more a week.

Unless you have prebooked your trip and organised venue viewings here are the obstacles you may come across if you decide to visit Spain during busy wedding months.

You cannot access the venues, they are full and have weddings on.
All the event managers at the hotels are otherwise engaged and cannot attend to meetings.
You cannot see suppliers, they are booked with weddings and are too busy to attend to meetings.
If you wish to view private villas, they may having paying guests staying there so you won’t be able to view the property unless the guests concede and allow access during their stay.

My summary and mantra for this blog post is be organised and be aware that you need to contact us and any wedding supplier sooner rather than later.   We are here and willing to help but we are human and running businesses that are at times so busy it does not leave us anytime to factor in last minute requests and demands made upon us.

It is not within us to want to disappoint clients as we run hospitality led businesses and our aim is to please and delight our clients but when we are given last minute demands and unrealistic timelines we just are not able to fulfill these to the best of our abilities.

Be an organised bride to be and give us lots of notice, as much information as possible and appreciate our time and efforts.

If we meet with you and follow up our meeting it would be lovely to have a response instead of nothing, we have taken time out of our busy schedules to spend time with you chatting weddings and it is just courtesy to follow up.  

If you have decided on another planner or stylist then tell us, we are not offended, usually it is one of our business buddies you have booked so we will know what you decided in anycase!

Images taken from Pinterest

Here at Reviva we do create many fantastic memorable weddings and one of my absolute favourite no fail combinations is a beautiful ceremony at the stunning Encarnacion Church in the quaint Old Town of Marbella followed by a chic and sleek stylish party at the jaw dropping La Cabane.  It is a win win situation!

Michelle and Gordon wanted this perfect wedding scenario and what fun we had planning and designing their dream day with them, they were an absolute delight to work with and we enjoyed every minute of working on their wedding and post wedding beach party.

It was a pretty hot day here at the end of June as the heatwave started to rack up and hit Southern Spain and the temperatures rose into the 90’s, it got worse after this, that is another story but it was hot enough for the centrepieces to mist up as the temperatures were so high!


Michelle and Gordon had friends and family flying in from all over the world to join them in their celebrations and celebrate they did.  We created some cool ideas such as the Man Corner and the Glo Bar which sadly Jeremy missed for the photos, so he is now hanging his head in shame but has been forgiven as they were later in the night.   

Michelle said she loved seeing the glo bunny ears and glasses later popping up all over the place and it was such a fun idea.

Despite probably many hangovers the party continued the next day hosting a paella and BBQ evening at a local chiringuito which I understand finished about 5am!

Our congratulations to Michelle and Gordon and again a huge thank you to all our professional suppliers without whom we could not execute such wonderful days.  

Drum role!  Alex Harrocks for superstar wedding hair, Sweet Things by Fi for the gold leaf wedding cake which I did not get to eat, test or even sniff, Sarah Howard Duo for fabulous cocktail music, Legal Aliens for seriously rocking this wedding!  Along with the ever talented Reviva girls, Isabel, Jess, Rocio and moi 🙂

Thank you to Jeremy Standley for his amazing images and allowing us to share such a cool wedding!

Chris and Sam contacted us to help them organise their wedding in Spain as we had previously organised their best friends, Katy and Scott’s wedding in 2010 and came recommended.

We were delighted to meet Katy and Scott again complete with firstly a bump at the beginning of the planning, then later a beautiful little boy! It was so lovely to also meet the now doting grandparents again too and with Katy and Scott as best man and bridesmaid, they were of course on duty for the night!

What a lot of fun Chris and Sam were, they instantly fell in love with the villa set on the lakes in Marbella and loved the fact it was private as music was to play a big part of their wedding and partying outside all night was a must for the club lovers!

Having settled quickly on the venue we started planning what I call the sporran noodle wedding, we wanted to combine both the Scottish for Chris with the Chinese for Sam and the overall theme was of course music.  

The catering by Chez Vous combined various different elements of both traditions of food, serving a mix of oriental and Scottish canapes and finishing off the evening with boxes of noodles for midnight snacks.

The decoration and stationery was created with a lot of input from Chris and Sam, using vinyl records as table centrepieces, and Chris had even ordered vinyl record cake stands, which took quite a few of us putting heads together to get them assembled and to stand upright!  

Chris organised the favours to bring in the music theme with musical note placecard holders and stubby holders for beers. 

The tables were simply decorated with purple and orange flowers in glassware, surrounded by some retro coloured tealight holders we found in Casa with Chris and Sam on a shopping trip.

We finished off the decor with lots of lanterns and candles, hung hearts supplied by Sam from the trees and created the table seating plan, again using the record theme and the tables named after famous nightclubs.

The golden wheelbarrow made it’s appearance filled with ice and bottled beers!

Our thanks to all the wonderful suppliers who were part of Sam and Chris’s special day here in Marbella, Kathryn Parr for Hair and Make Up, Julia at Chez Vous for the catering, Monkey Tennis for the entertainment and of course David Toms for the fabulous photographs.

A huge congratulations to Chris and Sam who were such fun to work with and looking forward to meeting with you all next time you are in Marbella!

Over the past five years I have watched the trend of lifestyle photography branching out and covering so many subjects as well as weddings.  

We have maternity shoots, new baby shoots, engagement shoots, family portraits and each day I look at many images of beautifully captured once in a lifetime moments taken by some very talented photographers.

About three years ago, I first heard of boudoir shoots and can´t say the idea caught my attention as felt, dare I say, it was slightly tacky but how wrong I was.    

It was only last year my view point on this new trend changed as I witnessed some of my brides presenting their new husbands with jaw dropping beautifully produced photographic albums full of creative and intimate images and realised how personal and special these photographs were and the effort that had been made to to create such a meaningful gift.  I loved the excitement between the bride and her bridesmaids as they admired the photos and were so excited about the surprise present about to be presented to the groom.

All these images are feminine, creative and beautifully thought through from the make up and hair to the outfits and having chatted to Aleksandra about producing these intimate photos she said she loves the reaction of the women she photographs as it gives them self confidence and a huge boost.  I love the fact you do not have to have a model figure or be incredibly beautiful, they are all evocative and seductive regardless of shape and size.

This is what lifestyle photography is, it is capturing everyday events and special moments and life in general, so it is a wonderful talent to be able to photograph and document this so well.

Aleksandra is a beautiful person and a wonderful photographer based here in Mijas whom I have had the pleasure of meeting on a few occasions as she has worked on some of our weddings and I personally love her work.  Aleksandra is available for both lifestyle and wedding photography and if you would like to see more do hop over to Aleksandra´s website and I am sure we will be seeing a lot more of her stunning and elegant images this year.