Honeymoons aren’t for everyone. Some couples may want to skip or postpone the whole experience in order to pay off the wedding, buy a house or put money in investment accounts. But if you want your marriage experience to be capped by a truly memorable vacation, there are plenty of amazing places to go for a honeymoon!
The most common honeymoon destinations over the past few years have been:
California Wine Country
Greece 
Hawaii
Switzerland 
Colorado 
Florida 
Belize 
Las Vegas 
South Africa 
Italy 
Even though these places have spectacular views, you don’t really need one of these fancy locales in order for your honeymoon to be special. If you want to have a nice honeymoon experience without spending too much, there are lots of options! You could always rent out a cabin in a local mountainous area, or go to a nice bed and breakfast for a week. Then again, a couple who really doesn’t care to travel could just have a stay-cation for their honeymoon, and cuddle up in front of some great movies with a few expensive bottles of wine and their favorite snacks.
Regardless of what you do for a honeymoon, it’s definitely a great idea to do at least something special after your wedding. For most people, their wedding will be one of the most important events in their life, and you don’t want to look back later and regret not taking a trip, or at least taking a little time off after your wedding!
The Origin of Honeymoons
Where did the honeymoon come from? Well, the first instance of its use seems to be in the 1540s, and was used in a figurative sense from the 1570s onward, and it narrowed to only be used after weddings sometime during the 1800s.
The first part of the word, the honey, refers to the incredibly sweet nature of a newlywed couple. Yet the second part, the moon, refers to the fleeting and ephemeral nature of that sweetness! So the word seems to be a little more bittersweet than most would probably recognize. Interestingly enough, there are also French and German equivalents. In French, lune de miel literally translates to honeymoon, but the German word flitterwochen apparently means “tinsel week!” (Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/honeymoon)
How Honeymoons Have Changed Over Time
Today, honeymoons are big business – the honeymoon industry contains somewhere between $8 and $12 billion dollars in spending every year! https://www.tripsavvy.com/wedding-statistics-and-honeymoon-facts-1860546 (https://www.soundvision.com/article/wedding-statistics-in-the-united-states) But were honeymoons always this popular?
Apparently, before the mid-20th century honeymoons were mainly reserved to the upper class. Noble and aristocratic families in Europe would take so-called “bridal tours,” which could consist of up to months of travelling, and typically involved many more family members than just the newlywed couple. But back then travelling internationally was quite expensive and dangerous, so couples tended to stay in Europe. (https://ultimatewedding.digital/2015/03/honeymoons-through-the-ages/)
Nowadays of course, travel is less expensive than ever! After about the 1960s, honeymoons became much more popular, and continue to increase in popularity today. Domestic and international travel has become cheaper than ever, and despite how you feel every Monday, average working hours have gone down quite a bit, over the past couple centuries, while vacation time has increased by a ton!
Today, there are around 2.4 million couples being married every year, and 1.4 million of those couples go on honeymoons. So as you can probably tell, the practice of honeymooning has become much more popular! Newly-wed couples can go almost anywhere they’d like, and it typically isn’t as expensive as you’d think, as the average spending on a honeymoon is $4,466. This number may seem big, but compared to the average spending on weddings – $35,329! – spending on honeymoons doesn’t seem too large after all. https://www.tripsavvy.com/wedding-statistics-and-honeymoon-facts-1860546
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