Marcella Doran reflects on how destination weddings have transformed over the past 20 years
Working in the destination wedding planning industry for over twenty years, Bangor Erris native, Marcella Doran, knows a thing or two about planning a wedding in the sun.
At just 17 years of age, Marcella left her home in Mayo for the UK, where she spent the next decade working as an air hostess based at Heathrow Airport. While she enjoyed travelling and the opportunities the role offered, after ten years, she felt ready for a new challenge.
She joined Columbia Pictures in London, now Sony Pictures, where she developed valuable experience in event coordination by organising large-scale conferences and corporate events.
“After leaving home at 17 and spending so many years in England, it just started to feel like the right time for a change,” she told The Mayo News.
That change eventually brought Marcella, her husband, and their young son to the Spanish town of Alcalalí, where they began building a new life.
After spending some time teaching drama at a local school, Marcella realised she could combine her professional event-planning experience with her own experience of getting married in Spain.
“I thought I’d put my experience from Columbia Pictures to use. I’d organised conferences there, and when I’d got married in Spain myself, nobody was offering the kind of service I now provide. It was a real lightbulb moment.”
Convinced that organising weddings couldn’t be more difficult than managing international conferences, she took a leap of faith and established her own destination wedding planning business.
“I thought if I could organise conferences with delegates coming from all over the world, organising weddings wouldn’t be too bad,” she said.
Like many new businesses, growth came gradually at first. Marcella organised just ten weddings during her first year, but demand quickly began to increase.
“The following year, it grew to around 25, and it just kept growing. Now we organise almost 100 weddings over a six or seven-month season,” she said.
More than 20 years later, Marcella has become one of the most experienced planners helping Irish couples tie the knot in Spain, overseeing every detail from venues and suppliers to legal paperwork and guest logistics.
Destination weddings have also become increasingly popular over the last thirty years among couples in Ireland.
In 2025, the Department of Foreign Affairs issued more than 2,400 civil Letters of Freedom, also known as Certificates of Freedom to Marry, to Irish citizens planning to marry abroad.
While Irish couples have long chosen overseas weddings, Marcella says the scale and style of those celebrations have changed dramatically, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“When I started, most weddings had 40 or 50 guests. A wedding with 80 people was unusual. After the Covid-19 pandemic, everything changed dramatically.”
Today, guest lists of between 100 and 150 people are commonplace.
“We even have one next week with 209 guests,” she said.
From Marcella’s experience, the pandemic changed how couples viewed weddings and family gatherings.
“After Covid, people wanted more than just a wedding. They wanted a holiday, an experience, and quality time with family and friends.”
Rather than hosting a single day of celebrations, many couples now plan multi-day events, giving guests the chance to enjoy holidays together while celebrating the wedding.
The way couples find wedding planners has also changed dramatically over the years.
“When I first started, Weddings Online was really the only place advertising weddings abroad,” Marcella said.
Today, social media has become the driving force behind the industry.
“Most of our Irish weddings still come through word of mouth, especially from Mayo, but social media has completely taken over. Our website isn’t what we’re relying on anymore.”
Platforms such as Instagram and Facebook now allow couples to discover venues, suppliers, and planners long before making their first enquiry, while online recommendations and reviews play a significant role in helping couples choose who to trust with one of the biggest days of their lives.
Despite living in Spain for many years, Marcella still has strong links to home and continues to organise weddings for Mayo couples.
“Our Mayo weddings are huge. We recently had one with 150 guests flying from Knock,” she said.
For Marcella, however, the size of the wedding is never what makes it memorable.
“The weddings that stay with me are the ones with beautiful people – and I mean beautiful hearts,” she said.
After more than two decades in business, one of the greatest rewards is seeing the lives that have grown from the weddings she helped create.
She often watches couples she married more than 20 years ago raising families of their own through social media, something she describes as incredibly special.
Ultimately, she says, helping couples create lifelong memories is what continues to motivate her after all these years.
“Giving people beautiful memories is the best feeling in the world,” she said.
“When couples thank not only me but my entire team, it reassures me that we’ve done the right job.”
