If you live in North America and your extended family is in India, this is the decision that shapes everything else. There is no universally right answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling one of the two. Here is how it actually breaks down.
| India | Mexico or the Caribbean | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per event | Substantially lower. Vendors, decor, catering and staffing all cost a fraction of the North American equivalent. | Higher per event, but often fewer events and a smaller guest list. |
| Guest list size | Expands. Once you are in India, the family list is very hard to contain, and 500 is normal. | Contracts naturally. The flight is a filter, whether you want it to be or not. |
| Who bears the travel cost | Your North American guests, and many will not come. | Your India-based guests, and visa costs and processing fall on them too. |
| Vendor quality and choice | Unmatched. Decor, catering, artists, priests, everything, at a depth no resort can approach. | Good at the established properties, limited elsewhere, and imported vendors carry resort fees. |
| Your own workload | High, unless family on the ground carries it. Coordinating from 12,000 km away is genuinely hard. | Lower. One property, one contract, one coordinator. |
| Visas | Your North American guests need an Indian visa. Manageable but not free. | Indian passport holders often need a Mexican visa unless they hold a valid US, Canadian, Schengen, UK or Japanese one. This trips people up constantly. |
| Time with your guests | Large events, less individual time. You will not speak properly to most of the 500. | Four or five days with everyone in one place. This is the real argument for a destination wedding. |
| Weather risk | Monsoon and heat, region dependent. | Hurricane season June to November, September and October worst. |
Write down your guest list and mark each person by where they live. If two thirds are in North America, a wedding in India means most of the people closest to you will not be there, whatever they say now. If two thirds are in India, the same is true in reverse for a Cancun wedding.
Where the list is genuinely split, there is a third answer worth taking seriously. Thailand, Dubai and to a lesser extent Greece and Turkey sit between the two, and for a wedding where the bride's side is in Toronto and the groom's family is in Delhi, a four-hour flight for one side and a long-haul for the other is often fairer than asking one family to absorb the whole burden.
We plan destination weddings outside India, and we plan luxury travel within India. We are not an Indian wedding production house and we will not pretend to be one. If after this conversation India is clearly the right answer for your family, we will tell you so, and we can still handle the group air and the travel logistics for your North American guests getting there.
