Blog homeI am going to a wedding this summer and have recently received the wedding list. Rather than the standard “china” and household goods (that seem to make up quite a number of wedding lists nowadays) - Alex and Alex (neither being me incidentally) have gone for contributions towards experiences on their honeymoon.
See http://www.alexandalexwedding.net/weddinglist/s_viewlist.php for the full list. The wedding list is fully available online (but probably only for the next few months or so)
The basic premise is that the honeymoon is laid out on a webpage and individuals can make a financial contribution towards all elements of trip. For example the flight, a day trip to the Bako National Park, Sarawak etc.
It would make an interesting website if a travel agency started to offer a travel wedding list service. Instead of taking financial contributions, the agency could create a tool that enables these lists to be managed online - and then book the elements as required. Some elements could never be booked by a travel agent - but the tool would handle that as well (on behalf of the lucky couple).
This is something that a travel agent would be best placed to do - not a tour operator - due to the diverse range of products that would be required to be available.
Expect to see some enterprising travel website picking this up in the next few months…..
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Hi Alex - Glad you like our website!
My brother Jon Bowyer developed the web application, in mySQL & PHP, which we integrated with the HTML/CSS site which Alex & I wrote. The application also has a basic CMS so that Alex & I can add/edit list items and view contributions made without finding out who they are from (until the time of the wedding)
Thought I’d add something of the history:
Having lived together for a couple of years we didn’t really need anything for the house. A friend of mine who recently got married told me that they had used their honeymoon as the wedding list - using a service from travel agent Trailfinders - see http://www.trailfinders.com/giftlist - which allows wedding guests to donate gifts to specific trip options bought through Trailfinders
We wanted more flexibility to pick any experience, and have a flexible trip, rather than having to buy everything from one travel agent. So we decided to go down the route of custom building our own web application - fortunately Jon was able to code this for us and act as the wedding list coordinator.
So - in a sense - there are travel agents already doing this - but I think you are right that there is scope for a new business opportunity - in the same way that websites like so called “clicks n mortar” sites are allowing people to sell their houses online cutting out the middleman, there is scope for selling this as a service to people who want to use honeymoon experiences for a wedding list - the service could include helping the couple to pick experiences, creating & hosting the website, and acting as list coordinator - collecting funds, booking things etc. The service could charge the couple - or alternatively could get money by getting holiday suppliers to pay to list their “experiences” as options couples could pick from…
Very interesting to think about the possibilities, we hadn’t thought about the general applicability of the concept - so thanks for writing this!
Cheers
Alex