How To Plan The Perfect Wedding & Honeymoon Safari in Kenya

If you are looking for an incredibly exotic, luxurious and otherworldly destination for your wedding and honeymoon, Kenya is the perfect place. Home to incredible backdrops (Kenya offers mountains, lakelands and savannah), incredible adventure, culture and natural wildlife (lions, elephants and rhinos, oh my!) this country in East Africa is certainly not your average wedding location and that’s what makes it so incredible.

Scott Dunn is a luxury travel company which specializing in planning bespoke trips around the world and including weddings and safaris in Kenya. Alison Carey (who works at the company as a travel guide) and her husband Andrew Felfoldi recently had their wedding and honeymoon in Kenya. Carey says it was a dream destination for a number of reasons.

“Getting married in Kenya was absolutely the right decision for us and provided the exact balance of exotic adventure, luxury and intimacy that we were hoping for,” Carey shares. “We had always wanted to do a small destination wedding and to share more than ‘just a party’ with our loved ones. So as lovers of wildlife and remote places, Kenya quickly become our top choice and we could not have been happier for the opportunity to invite our loved ones along for a once-in-a-lifetime safari adventure. Our guests were truly amazed by the jaw-dropping scenery, majestic wildlife, delicious food and warm, wonderful people. Our actual wedding day was calm and organized and the overall trip was action packed yet restorative—all of our guests left saying that it was the most incredible week of their lives!”

If a wedding in Kenya sounds like it also might be perfect for you, Carey has some savvy planning tips to consider for the destination.

• Choose an all-inclusive property. “One of the main reasons I chose Africa was for ease of planning and accounting. I knew that everything was included and exactly what it would cost.”
• Consider a location easy for guests. “This is one of the reasons I selected Kenya. I was really open to any good safari destination in Africa, but we ended up going with Kenya because it has a great reputation and Nairobi has lots of international flights.”

• Look for a location with wedding experience. When looking for the right location, I tried to pick somewhere that had a good track record as well as somewhere that had done a wedding in the past. This was important.”
• Rely on your venue to help with vendors. “If you’re worried about hiring caterers, photographers, florists and bakers in a location that you’re not in, don’t. It was surprisingly easy. The hotel had excellent existing local contacts for us to choose from.”

• Expect the unexpected! “Build in some downtime before and after the wedding. I added many more safari drives than I knew I would go on, because as with any wedding, and especially a destination wedding, there were going to be last minute details that would come up and unplanned changes that would happen.”
• Arrive ahead of your guests. “We were at the property a day earlier than all of the guests, so we could do a private safari as a couple and go on a walk-through of the venue. It really helped me de-stress and it got all of our guests excited to arrive, seeing our trip photos on social media.”