Opinion on only using a honeymoon registry

When I did my Zola registry I found people were more inclined to purchase the activities i put such as day cruise or couples spa session etc rather than just giving $ into the general cash fund

Like Melle, we also designated certain "activities" such as a couples massage, sunset dinner cruise, sight seeing tour, wine tasting, etc. The younger people tended to purchase these activity gifts and the older folks gave us checks. The money we received ended up covering about 2/3 of the cost of our honeymoon. We also had a traditional registry though, and suitcases were definitely on it!

I would also add that designating money towards certain activities made it a lot easier to write more unique thank you notes that were less generic sounding. Such as "We're so excited to use your gift to go snorkeling on our honeymoon--we've never been snorkeling before and are thrilled to experience this for the first time together"

A friend set hers up for people to buy certain activities to do on their honeymoon. It was a hit!

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Wow that is so awesome! Were they able to get majority of the cost for the honeymoon?

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Ok. For the older folks, how did they give you the checks?

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Did you use Zola for a registry and plan And have your website on wedding wire?

View Quoted Comment I had my wedding website somewhere else that wasn’t Zola or WeddingWire

We are doing Honeyfund. I know some people are 100% against it, but it makes sense for us. We put activities (dinner theatre, sight seeing activities, dinner, pancake breakfast, etc) that we want to do around Gatlinburg for our honeymoon. We already have everything we need for our home and while we understand people probably would just give money with no registry, we knew we would do those activities more if it was where someone had specifically gifted it to us us versus us just spending the money ourselves. Does that make sense?

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Most placed them in the card box which was set up at our reception. A few others sent us checks in the mail

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Got it. Thanks!

View Quoted Comment They did. It worked really well for them!

I'm going to be the unpopular opinion here, but I personally don't like honeymoon funds.

My brother and his fiancee inly have that on their site with no other registry option. And now with travel being so up in the air due to COVID, they're now fighting to be able to use these funds for the same trip at another time. Essentially some guests have wasted their money on a trip that they may not even be able to go on.

Be aware that many people do not give cash gifts, be it a check or donating to a honeymoon fund. Etiquette says it's never appropriate to ask guests for money in any form. If you don't have a registry, you will receive gifts you don't want and can't return that you still have to accept graciously with prompt thank yous.

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Very good point. I did not think of that. Thank you!

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I'd hate to see you run into the same issue as they have recently. They booked hotels/flights/excursions as money was being gifted. Unfortunately their trip was to a country that relies heavily on tourism (not making this political of course), and now they've been fighting the airlines, hotels, you name it to either recoup their money or change dates. So far they've only been able to successfully get a refund from the airline.