Lauren Perillo and Evan Brown knew they were asking a lot of their family and friends to fly to Mexico in January of last year for their wedding at Rosewood Mayakoba in Riviera Maya. The expense of the trip, paired with the time and effort to plan it, was significant.
So, Perillo, 28, a lawyer, and Brown, also 28, an investment banker, who live in Houston, decided to focus on making their nuptials a memorable escape for each of their 120 guests. “We were cognizant that coming to our wedding could create pressure, and we wanted to make it easy and fun,” Perillo said.
Their solution was to hire a concierge, Stephanie Meckert, a travel adviser with River Oaks Travel in Houston, to look after guests. The couple shared Meckert’s contact information on their wedding website and explained that she could help attendees with their travel and help create personalized itineraries.
Among Meckert’s roles were booking flights, arranging airport transfers, managing room requests and advising on entry requirements and travel protections. She also organized local excursions and spa treatments, made restaurant reservations and planned trips to other destinations in Mexico, including after the wedding.
“The impact of looping in a concierge was really apparent,” Perillo said, adding that many guests still say that going to their wedding was “relaxing, enjoyable and convenient.”
A growing number of couples have been turning to concierges dedicated to wedding guests. Perillo and Brown declined to share how much they paid Meckert, but her fees typically start at around $6,000 per event. The cost of other concierges can climb into the tens of thousands, depending on the number of guests, the location and the services provided.
These professionals, often travel advisers or freelancers with event experience, collaborate with event planners before and during the festivities. And while concierges are particularly handy for destination weddings, their services are increasingly extending to local celebrations as couples put more emphasis on hospitality beyond the wedding itself.
It’s difficult to find data specific to wedding concierges, but according to the Knot’s 2026 Real Weddings Study, couples said that guest experience was a top priority, and the Knot’s editorial director, Esther Lee, said she has seen anecdotal evidence that they’re becoming more common.
“When couples are making decisions related to their wedding, they’re asking themselves: ‘How do I make my guests feel?’” she said. “They want them to have the best-in-class hospitality.”
Donna Perillo, the bride’s mother and a wedding planner who helped plan her daughter’s wedding in Mexico, said that most of the seven destination weddings she has planned this year included a guest concierge, compared with none three years ago. Of the dozen weddings she has planned in Houston, where she’s based, half have included one.
Lisa Santasiero, a home developer in Houston, was one of the guests at the Perillo-Brown wedding earlier this year and appreciated the help. “Stephanie made me hair appointments, booked us spa treatments, helped me fix my husband’s jacket when it tore,” Santasiero said. She’s turning to Meckert again for a November wedding in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where Meckert is once again the guest concierge.
Invaya, a destination wedding planning company based in Velp, the Netherlands, includes guest concierge services in all of its weddings, with the cost built into the overall price of the celebration. The founder, Vivian ter Huurne, whose planning fees start at $23,000, said she made the service a standard part of her events after noticing a shift among couples toward being “less about impressing the room, more about the people actually in it.”
Her clients included Sigrid Frandsen, 55, the chief executive of an instructional design company, and Frederick Anton, 56, a lawyer, who live in Philadelphia. Their eight-day wedding celebration in November 2024 took place across several locations in Morocco, including Kasbah Tamadot near Marrakech, and involved coordinating travel logistics and other requests for 60 people.
Ter Huurne and her team created a book for each guest with personalized itineraries, language tips and the photos and names of other attendees to help them recognize each other. They also arranged group and private activities, including stargazing with an astronomer, quad biking and hot air balloon rides. During the event, Huurne’s team greeted each guest at the airport and managed numerous requested itinerary changes.
Colette Seidel, a nonprofit manager in Philadelphia and a guest at the wedding, viewed Ter Huurne as a “sorcerer,” who anticipated guests’ needs and handled them ahead of time.
Thanks to Ter Hurrne’s “magic,” she said, “what I remember of that week was wonderful times with very good friends.”
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