How to Plan a Maine Wedding Weekend
Most wedding planning advice assumes you’re booking a single afternoon. If you’re planning a wedding weekend instead, one where the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, the reception and a farewell breakfast all happen at the same property, the timeline looks different. Here’s roughly how a wedding weekend at Village by the Sea tends to unfold.
Thursday & Friday: everyone arrives
Guests start checking into their suites Thursday or Friday, which is the first real advantage of a venue with on-site accommodations, there’s no single check-in rush and no one showing up to an empty hotel room an hour before the rehearsal. Because every suite has its own kitchen, a lot of families use Friday to settle in properly, unpack groceries, and let kids nap somewhere that isn’t a car.
Getting ready happens in a suite with a real living room instead of a single hotel room shared by six bridesmaids and a photographer. It sounds like a small thing until you’re the one trying to do hair and makeup in a space built for two people to sleep in.
Friday evening: rehearsal and welcome
The rehearsal itself happens at the pergola with your coordinator walking through the ceremony, usually late Friday afternoon. From there, most couples move into a rehearsal dinner or welcome reception in the York Room, which seats up to sixty and sits upstairs in the same conference center as the Maine Ballroom. Nobody has to get back in a car to get there.
Saturday: the day itself
Ceremony at the pergola, cocktail hour on the covered terrace while the ballroom is flipped behind the scenes, then dinner and dancing in the Maine Ballroom. A typical wedding day here runs ceremony in the late afternoon, cocktail hour for about an hour, and a reception that runs into the evening, though the exact schedule depends on your package and your photographer’s light preferences.
Because the reception venue and the guest rooms are the same eleven acres, the night doesn’t have a hard stop dictated by a shuttle schedule. When the sparklers come out, guests are already home.
Sunday: breakfast, then the beach
A farewell breakfast on Sunday morning is the part most traditional venues can’t offer, because most traditional venues don’t have anywhere for your guests to have stayed the night before. Here, it’s a natural continuation of the weekend rather than a separate event to plan. Guests who are staying on have Wells Beach a few minutes away for the rest of the day.
What to book, and when
- Package and date: as early as possible
- Room block: set up at no cost to you once your date is confirmed
- Rehearsal dinner headcount: usually finalized a few weeks out
- Vendors: DJ, photography and florals booked separately, coordinated by our team
A group room block is created at no up-front cost to you, and your guests book and pay for their own suites against it, which means you’re not fronting a hotel contract on top of everything else.