As any 21st century bride knows you need to 'try before you buy'. Increasingly, couples decide to live together before they get married. The only downside to this pre-nuptial bliss? What gifts to ask for! But what do you do if you don't need a new steam iron or cotton sheets but the thought of asking for cold hard cash fills you with dread? What are the other options?
There is something that any bride and groom would find hard to refuse: the honeymoon of their dreams! A honeymoon gift list works in a very similar way to a traditional department store gift registry, but instead of kitchen implements or fresh towels, you put together a list of experiences and activities for your honeymoon.
Imagine champagne chilling in your upgraded hotel suite, a gourmet meal in the flickering candle light as the ocean laps nearby. It's all so much more appealing than a blender - and so much more appealing for your guests, too, who'll feel that they've given you a really special treat instead of merely contributing to an anonymous pot of cash.
Some honeymoon wedding list services operate as extensions of travel agencies, forcing you to book your honeymoon travel and accommodation through them in order to use the registry service. Others cater to the independent traveller, but charge a commission on anything reserved through the site, so that your guests are funding the service directly from their gifts.
Buy Our Honeymoon (http://www.buy-our-honeymoon.com/) is the UK's leading honeymoon wedding list service, and takes a different approach. The site charges a one-off fee of £55 and allows you to receive payment for any gifts reserved from your list in whatever way suits you best - in cash on your wedding day, by cheque through the post, or online using a credit or debit card into your own PayPal account.
You can choose from a variety of beautiful design themes, personalise your wedding list pages with your own photos, and add absolutely anything you wish to your online list. Buy Our Honeymoon offers dedicated telephone and email support to you and your guests, together with 70 customisable registry cards as part of the package.
The site was borne out of the founders' hopes for their own dream honeymoon road trip across the Deep South of the USA:
"We realised that we really didn't need any of the things traditionally found in wedding gift lists. We'd been living together for years, and had cultivated a fine habit of buying each other kitchen implements as Christmas presents. A normal gift list would have been slightly redundant and, frankly, a waste of our guests' money," says Shelley Green.
"We'd heard of people asking for money towards their honeymoon but didn't want to ask our friends and family simply to do that. We thought it would be much better if people knew what the money was for. So, we thought we'd ask our guests for specific things we were planning for our honeymoon: theme park tickets, a car upgrade, a cabin in the Smoky Mountains, meals, champagne."
And as for whether their guests approved... "We were surprised by how much our guests loved it, many of them going well beyond the call of duty in their generosity. We had been concerned that some of our older guests might feel that we were simply asking for cash and consider us rude. We needn't have worried, though: our guests each felt that their gift was the specific experience or activity they'd reserved and not the cash value we'd assigned to it."
For more information on how to make the most of your honeymoon gift list, visit Buy Our Honeymoon at http://www.buy-our-honeymoon.com/ or call 0845 224 0189.