If you're having a wedding overseas, I highly recommend getting a wedding planner based in your wedding destination. It's quite difficult to find venues and vendors from afar, and communication with them can be hampered by time differences and sometimes even language barriers (not a problem for us in Hawaii though). If you have a wedding planner local to the area, they make these problems non-existent! You just have to communicate with your wedding planner by email and phone (sometimes web cam chat too!), and that's it! They take care of all other communication with vendors, suppliers, etc.

We decided to make things easier on ourselves. After we decided where to have our wedding, we started the search for a wedding planner.

This was quite challenging as we didn't know anyone who'd used a wedding planner in Hawaii, a recommendation would have made knowing who to trust a lot simpler. I used Google to look for wedding planners in Oahu and narrowed down the choices based on how good their website looked (if they couldn't even manage a good looking website, how could they make my wedding look beautiful?), how good the pictures of their previous weddings looked, and how good the testimonials on their sites were (taken with a grain of salt of course).

I bought some American wedding magazines as well and read through them to see which wedding planners were mentioned and recommended for Hawaii. The Grace Ormonde Platinum List was a big help. 

We narrowed the choices down to 5, emailed them all, and spoke with our top 2 on the phone. We asked LOADS of questions and engaged in some general chit chat to see how well we got on with each one and if we felt they understood what kind of people we were and what kind of wedding we wanted. Afterwards, Nick and I had a lengthy discussion, and chose a lovely lady called Christina Farrow from a company called Pacific Aisles. With the wedding 5 weeks away, I can say that we don't have any regrets about our choice!

I'm particularly keen to have Christina on the day of the wedding. Basically, I want her to take care of everything. If a problem arises, I don't even want to know about it, or even know it existed till after the wedding. I just want her to take care of it, and tell me about it another day over a cocktail!

It is exactly 5 weeks till the big day, and I'm so glad I have Christina to make things so much smoother :)