Jess Robinson and her husband Keiran have always enjoyed holidays and big gatherings with friends and family so the couple decided against a honeymoon, instead inviting their guests to join them on a “buddymoon”.
Rather than just the two of them heading off after their wedding in July 2023 for a break, their guests were welcome to stay with them for a week at a Spanish villa.
“Holidaying together is something we’ve done for years so there was no reason for us to change things just because we were getting married,” said Robinson, 35, a pharmaceutical worker from Buckinghamshire. “We work really well as a group and it was just like our annual holiday really, but we did it after our wedding.”
Among their guests were friends the couple had made while at Manchester University. “At university, I remember our favourite part of a night out was always the next morning when you would all gossip about what happened and look at the photos. After the wedding, we had a whole week of that.”
The couple got married in the grounds of a seven-bedroom villa, an hour from Barcelona, with some guests travelling from Australia and the US. They felt, given the distance people had travelled, it would be “nice for them to have a holiday too”.
Twelve adults and five children, aged from six weeks to five years, stayed at the villa, while family decamped to Airbnbs nearby, meeting up for lunches and dinners.
The couple are seemingly not alone in wanting to share their honeymoon.
People inviting friends and family on buddymoons seems to be an appealing option for couples keen to share the afterglow of their wedding. A survey by the online wedding hub, Hitched, found a fifth of couples intending to marry would consider having one.
Robinson said they had a brilliant time during their buddymoon. “After the pandemic, we really wanted a celebration and this was the perfect way to do it,” she said.
Covid also had an impact on how Ashley and Jessica Delport went about planning their wedding day after it was postponed four times.“We’d had this drum roll for so long that we decided to go all out for the wedding,” said Jessica, a lettings agent from Sutton, in south London. “We had waited so long we felt one day wasn’t enough and that’s when we thought of sharing our honeymoon with people.”
With the extra money they had saved during lockdown, they splashed out on their accommodation – a five-bedroom villa in Tuscany.
Jessica, 36, and Ashley, 40, an electrician, got married in London in April 2022. They had told friends and family they could come and visit them at the villa and were “so happy” when lots of people took up their offer.
The couple drove to Italy with their daughter, Dulcie, who was nine months old at the time, and had their first night alone before their guests began to arrive. Over the four weeks, they had about 20 people to stay.
“It was amazing,” said Jessica. “We had different people come and go and it was so fun to talk about the wedding with everyone, it couldn’t have gone better. Some people stayed so long we had to politely ask them to leave to make space for new people.”
Jessica said her sister was now keen on having her own buddymoon. “Everyone who came out on our honeymoon with us said, ‘This is the best idea. We’re copying it.’”
For Rosanna Ayton, a Las Vegas wedding and a honeymoon in Los Angeles sounded like the perfect combination, and when she and her fiance Jason suggested to friends they could join them on their adventure they were pleasantly surprised.
“We didn’t think anyone would really be bothered to do a Vegas weekend, which was very naive,” said Rosanna, 35, from Leeds.
In the end, 10 people flew over from the UK for the hen-stag do and wedding weekend in May 2019.
“We decided to get a house and make a thing of it,” said Rosanna, who works in student experience at a university.
After the wedding, Rosanna and Jason, 35, a sales manager for a biotech company, flew to LA with about five friends and met up with others to do shorter trips and sightseeing.
Rosanna said: “I think if you’re going away it’s good to make a thing out of it. There’s a chance that other people will make a thing out of it, so you might as well do it all together.
“We now have amazing memories of a whole holiday with our best friends, not just one hectic wedding day.”
