Planning a Destination Wedding in Puerto Vallarta: Your Complete Resource
Puerto Vallarta is one of the most beautiful places on earth to get married. The Pacific sunsets, the private villas cascading down toward the sea, the warmth of the city and its people — couples who have been here understand immediately why so many choose it for one of the most important days of their lives.
But planning a private villa destination wedding in another country, in another language, from hundreds or thousands of miles away, is genuinely complex. The couples who navigate it well, and who end up with weddings their guests talk about for years, are almost always the ones who understood the landscape before they started making decisions.
That’s what this resource is for.
We’ve been planning destination weddings in Puerto Vallarta for more than a decade. In that time, we’ve worked with couples from across the United States and Canada, at more than a dozen private villas and boutique venues, across a wide range of budgets and aesthetics and guest counts. The questions couples ask us — before they hire us, sometimes before they’ve even chosen a destination — tend to cluster around the same handful of decisions. This guide is our attempt to answer those questions thoroughly and honestly, in one place.
It is organized around the sequence in which those decisions actually need to be made.
What’s in this guide
Getting Started →
How far in advance to plan, what a local planner actually does, and the questions that matter most when you’re choosing who to work with.
Venues and Logistics →
The private villa vs. all-inclusive resort decision, a detailed guide to our most-booked venues, what the planning site visit involves, and how timing and seasonality affect everything.
Budget and Costs →
Real numbers from real quotes, how the four service levels work, why those Pinterest weddings cost what they cost, and how to prioritize within your budget.
Guest Experience →
How to build a guest list that actually works for a destination wedding, how to plan a full wedding weekend, and where to take your group in Puerto Vallarta.
LGBTQ+ Weddings in Puerto Vallarta →
Why Puerto Vallarta is one of the most genuinely welcoming destinations in the world for LGBTQ+ couples, how legal same-sex marriage works in Jalisco and Nayarit, and what it means to have an LGBTQ+-owned planning agency in your corner.
A note about this guide
Mexico Event Design is a gay-owned boutique wedding planning agency. We work exclusively in Puerto Vallarta, and a big percentage of our clients are LGBTQ+ couples — though not all, and every couple we work with receives the same level of care, creativity, and attention regardless of who they are.
The planning information in this guide applies to anyone considering a private villa destination wedding in Puerto Vallarta. The logistics of renting a villa, coordinating vendors, managing guest travel, and navigating the local market are the same for every couple. We’ve written this guide to be useful to anyone planning this type of wedding, because that’s what the information actually is.
If you’re ready to take the next step, our free planning guide covers the six most important decisions in more depth — and comes with sample budgets, venue information, and catering menus.