We Canceled Our 120-Person Wedding and Flew to Bali With 8 Guests. Here’s How We Got There.

November 11, 2025. A Tuesday. 9:47pm.

I remember the time because I was looking at my phone when my fiancé said it. We were sitting at the kitchen counter, the Google Sheet open on my laptop. The cell he was pointing at — “Total projected spend” — had just updated to $38,427.

He said: “What if we just didn’t do it?”

I stared at him for maybe six seconds. Then I started crying, which is how I knew he was right.

I’m a 29-year-old graphic designer in Portland. My fiancé is an engineer. We’d been planning our wedding for 11 months. We were six months out. Nobody — not us, not anyone we’d told — would have said we were having second thoughts.

But the Google Sheet had been climbing. Every week. $29k in July. $32k in September. $35k in October. By early November, we were watching it tick upward on nothing more than catering adjustments and a last-minute call from the florist about seasonal availability.

The thing is, neither of us wanted a 120-person wedding. We’d started with 60. We expanded to 85 when his family pushed back. We expanded to 120 when my mother’s work colleagues “assumed” they were invited. Each expansion required more infrastructure. Bigger venue. Larger catering minimum. More rooms blocked. More transportation.

By November, we were planning an event for people we barely knew, costing more than our combined annual rent, in a city neither of us particularly loved getting married in.

The alternative

The idea hit me the next morning: what if we just… went somewhere?

Not a destination wedding for 60. A real elopement. 8 people max. Our parents, our siblings, two closest friends.

I started a new tab on the spreadsheet. Called it “What if.” Started pricing.

We looked at four places:

Tulum. My first instinct. Then we researched. The vendor landscape is complicated right now — a lot of recent coverage about permit issues, cartel-adjacent issues, flooding risks in September. We dropped it in a week.

Chiang Mai. Culturally interesting, visually stunning, cheaper than most alternatives. But both sets of parents are in their 60s, and the travel day from Portland was 26+ hours with connections. Chris’s dad has knee issues. We dropped it.

Positano. The dream. The absolute dream. Also $42,000 for 8 people. Dropped.

Bali. Honestly, we hadn’t considered it. I had a vague association with it as a honeymoon destination, not a wedding destination. But my college roommate had done a 20-person Bali wedding in 2023 and sent me her budget breakdown that night.

The numbers made sense. $11,500 for the wedding itself. Flights for us would be $1,800 each. Our guests would pay their own way (and they had, immediately, said they would). The 2-day arrival buffer was manageable. Visa on arrival for the US passports was straightforward.

By November 15th — four days after the kitchen counter moment — we were researching Bali agencies.

The planning

I spent two weekends in late November comparing options for an intimate wedding abroad. We needed someone who understood that this wasn’t a “small” version of a traditional wedding. It was a completely different format: 8 people, 3-day format, all guests staying at the same villa with us, no separate reception space because the villa WAS the space.

The agencies that pitched us “intimate packages” that were really just scaled-down traditional packages didn’t get it. We wanted a weekend. Not a ceremony. We wanted the kind of event where my mom and his dad end up making breakfast together on Sunday morning.

We ended up signing with an agency that spent 45 minutes on our first call just asking what we wanted the weekend to feel like. They sent back a quote that organized the three days as a flow — welcome dinner Thursday, ceremony Friday evening, slow Saturday with brunch and beach time, departures Sunday morning.

Total: $11,900 for the agency portion. Plus $8,400 for the villa buyout for 4 nights. Plus roughly $800 for incidentals. All in: about $21,000 for the wedding, including villa for everyone.

Compared to $38,000 for a wedding we didn’t want, with 112 people we barely knew.

The weekend

We arrived in Ubud on February 18, 2026. The villa was in a small valley outside town, 18 minutes from the main street.

Thursday evening: welcome dinner at a long table on the villa’s open-air pavilion. My mom cried before dinner started. Chris’s dad gave an unscheduled toast. We ate for three and a half hours. Nobody checked a phone.

Friday evening: the ceremony. 5:15pm. Our celebrant was a Balinese woman named Ni Luh who’d done 200+ weddings and had the warmest energy of any person I’ve met. The ceremony lasted 11 minutes. My sister read a poem she’d written on the plane. Chris cried during his vows, which he’d sworn he wouldn’t do.

Afterward, dinner for the 10 of us (us + 8 guests) at the villa. We stayed up until 1am talking.

Saturday: nothing. On purpose. Guests swam, read books, took naps. We had a long dinner at a nearby warung that cost $240 for all of us.

Sunday morning: everyone left. Chris and I stayed in Bali for another nine days.

What I’d do differently

Three things, honestly.

I’d have had the kitchen-counter conversation earlier. The number of hours Chris and I spent on the first version of the wedding — the one we didn’t actually want — was embarrassing. If I’d been honest with myself in June instead of November, we’d have saved 5 months of stress and probably $4,000 in deposits we couldn’t recover.

I’d have told the extended family in person, not by email. My aunt specifically felt hurt, and in retrospect, a 15-minute phone call would have fixed what three emails didn’t. The elopement decision isn’t about them, but how you communicate it is.

I would’ve spent more on photography and less on the welcome dinner. The dinner was lovely. The photos are permanent. We used an in-house photographer the agency recommended, which was fine. If I’d done it again, I would’ve paid an extra $800 for a photographer whose work I’d specifically chosen.

What we gained

The honest answer is: everything we actually wanted.

My mom made breakfast with Chris’s dad on Sunday morning. The two of them, who’d met twice before, stood in the villa kitchen for 45 minutes making eggs for 10 people. Chris’s sister sat with my sister on the pool deck for three hours Saturday night, becoming friends in a way they wouldn’t have at a traditional wedding where they were seated at different tables.

My grandmother, who’s 84, told me on the plane home that it was the first wedding she’d been to since my grandfather’s funeral in 2019 that she had actually enjoyed. She said “I didn’t have to perform.”

Our wedding cost roughly a third of the original plan. It took one weekend. We left with photos, memories, and seven other people who felt like they’d been genuinely included rather than ceremonially present.

I’d do it exactly the same way again. Just earlier.