3 Unspoken Rules for Having a Disney World Wedding

If you’ve ever dreamed of having a fairytale wedding, you’re not alone. Disney Fairytale Weddings are literally a dream come true for many Disney fans, including me.

I was fortunate enough to have a Disney World wedding in 2022. My husband is NOT a Disney Adult, but he knew my passion for Disney and that nothing would make me happier than a Disney wedding. We got married in EPCOT at 7 AM in the morning on a Wednesday, thanks to the in-park wedding rules. But that’s not the only rule you should know about if you’re hoping for your own Fairytale Wedding.

Prepare for Random People to Crash Your Wedding

If you decide to get married in one of the four parks, you’ll likely have to have your wedding in the VERY early morning or VERY late at night, sometime when the park is closed (except in some special cases). This is because Disney does not want your wedding to interfere with the environment they have created for park guests. In these cases, it will just be you, your wedding party, and your guests.

On the other hand, if you choose to have your wedding at one of the other venues, such as at a resort hotel, you can have it at nearly any time of the day. The one unspoken rule about this, though, is that you should expect people to crash your wedding (kinda).

While no one is going to sit at your wedding ceremony uninvited or make an unwelcome scene, many of these venues are not private, so people passing by may, and likely will, stop to watch you get married. I mean, it is a beautiful sight, why wouldn’t they?!

If you’re getting married on the beach at Disney’s Beach Club, people along the walkway are going to be interested and find it adorable, so they might “crash” your wedding. So it’s important that you realize that as you plan your big day.

Disney Weddings Aren’t Just for Rich People

If you want to get married at Disney World, you absolutely can. The average cost of a wedding in the United States is around $30,000, and a Disney wedding averages around the same price. So it’s not a wild and unreachable idea to get married at Disney World!

I was really surprised when I first started planning my Disney Fairytale Wedding to find out that a wedding in Disney World was totally within my budget (and we didn’t have a huge one). It was just that a Disney wedding was VERY similar to getting married at home. The cost of your vacation (hotel room, travel, food outside the wedding event) is really the only extra cost that could vary from a wedding in your hometown.

Obviously, you can be extravagant and get married in front of Cinderella Castle and rent out Magic Kingdom for the night for well over $100,000, but a simple, cost-effective wedding at one of the many other venues is totally possible. You’ll work with the Disney Fairytale Weddings team to figure it all out, and they are wonderful to work with!

Characters Have Weird Rules

We decided to have the Mad Hatter greet our guests and us after our ceremony in the UK pavilion, for our Alice in Wonderland-themed wedding. We really wanted him to meet us at our dessert party, but here’s a weird rule you might not have known (and that put a kink in our plan): certain characters are only allowed to be seen in certain locations. So the Mad Hatter could only be at our event because it was in the UK pavilion.

Another wild rule for characters that made it impossible for the Hatter to be at our dessert party is that characters are limited in when and where they can be in the park. For example, we wanted the Mad Hatter to be at the dessert party at the UK Lochside event space. It was in the UK pavilion, so he should be able to be there, right? Nope! Since it was during regular park hours with regular park guests in an area that he would not typically be found in, he (and no other characters) was not allowed to be there.

We really wanted him to be at our event, so we settled on him popping in right after the ceremony for about 30 minutes. This add-on is one of the more expensive ones, costing us $4,000 in 2022.

The last interesting, unspoken rule about characters at a Disney wedding is that you are not guaranteed anyone until it’s officially in your contract. Some characters (ahem, Mickey and Minnie) are in VERY high demand and may end up being fought over for specific dates and times, while others may simply not be allowed or available for your wedding specifically (for reasons like those above or others). So even if they say it can happen, it doesn’t mean it will until it’s in writing.

Characters also usually have to be approved for the date, time, and location, so you may not find out for sure if you can have someone right away.

If you believe, as I used to, that Disney weddings are nothing more than a fairytale that’s inaccessible to you, trust me, they’re not! You can have the Disney Fairytale Wedding of your dreams. With proper planning and budgeting, these weddings are similar in price to what you would pay at most places around the U.S, and they are TONS of fun. So consider these rules when you’re planning your wedding, and check out the Disney Fairytale Weddings website to get started!

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Have you dreamed of a Disney World wedding? Let us know in the comments!

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