One of the first hurdles faced by any newly-engaged couple is coordinating available dates between the church or synagogue and their reception site. There were a lot of back-and-forth phone calls, backup dates, and attempts to negotiate earlier times when churches said they keep their Saturday mornings open for Christenings and funerals…even a year in advance! The scrambling took the bliss right out of the planning process and made couples very nervous, especially when they saw the prices for decorating the ceremony site and worried about transportation from place to place.

Now, there's a new trend that completely eliminates all the hassles and negotiations, site searches and extra expense: holding both the ceremony and reception in one place. Hotels and banquet halls have welcomed this option by offering one ballroom fully decked out for the ceremony, with linen-covered chairs, flowered arbors, an aisle runner, or perhaps a garden on the grounds where the ceremony can be held outdoors. Through the expert design of their coordinating teams and location managers, these sites provide a more beautiful ceremony site than most people could afford to create on their own. And countless brides and grooms say that this new site option gives them their choice of décor possibilities, which is not always offered by some houses of worship that demand approval of floral or candle plans, or don't allow candles at all. The on-site ceremony, then, frees the couple from restrictions and frustrations of having to adhere to a strict code.

The one-location ceremony and reception also answers wedding couples' unique needs for their belief systems. “We had everything at one location mainly because we were brought up in different faiths, but we're not religious, so a church or synagogue didn't seem appropriate for us,” says Maggie Levine, a recent bride from Brooklyn, New York, sharing her advice from the popular wedding website forum at PashWeddings.com. Another bride from the Pash forum, Cherin Galdi says, “He's Catholic and I'm Methodist and his family's church is very strict and wouldn't marry us unless I converted. Since I am not at all practicing but do not believe in the Catholic church either, I could not bring myself to convert to something I don't believe in. So, we decided to get married at a neutral location. We chose a country club his family uses for a lot of different events.”

With the growing number of non-religious weddings, or inter-faith and inter-denominational couples who wish to marry without changing their whole identities or belief systems, the one-location wedding answers their needs perfectly. They hold their wedding in that one beautiful site, bring in the officiants of their choosing -- whether it's a judge, mayor or other legally sanctioned officiant determined by their own township, or an independent officiant found at www.weddingofficiants.com – and custom-create the ceremony to reflect their own values. For the couple who isn't strongly tied to a house of worship, this is the ideal scenario.

Next comes, the money issue. When you only have one site for the ceremony and reception, there is no need to hire limousines at a cost of over a thousand dollars in some instances. There's no need to decorate a second site for hundreds of dollars in floral fees. There's no need to pay a house of worship's choir or organist or site caretaker, as is sometimes required. On-the-clock wedding professionals such as photographers, videographers and wedding coordinators need less time (and no travel time and expenses) to do their jobs in the one place. For these reasons and others, eliminating this other separate site, then, amounts to thousands of dollars saved, a very big attraction to many couples on a budget.

“Plus, we didn't have to worry about guests getting lost getting from point A to point B,” says Ms. Levine. With two-location weddings, travel concerns for guests require researching and printing up maps, including them in invitations packets and handing out printed directions on the wedding day. In contrast, guests arrive at the one location and stay there. When the ceremony and reception site are at the hotel where the guests are staying, that's even better. They never have to travel anywhere the entire wedding weekend. They can drink at the reception and walk upstairs to their hotel rooms. They can go up to their rooms to change a baby's diaper between the ceremony and reception. And the hotel site will often offer an on-site morning breakfast for guests, as well as other wedding weekend perks like use of the swimming pool and spa center.

When it comes to the timing of the day, two-location weddings often presented a gap between the ceremony and reception start time. Scheduling sometimes left no other option than an hour or two hours between the end of the ceremony and when the reception hall would be ready for their party. Guest were left on their own to find a place to hang out, and some guests even chose to skip the ceremony and just show up at the reception. “With our one-location wedding, we had no dreaded 3-hour gap between the ceremony and the reception,” says Ms. Levine. “The ceremony was in the dining room, equipped with a fireplace that acted as an altar and a nice view of the bay, and then people stepped right out onto the deck for cocktail hour, then returned back in for dinner.”

An important key in the one-location wedding is how one-location is it? If the ceremony and reception will be held in the same room, such as the ballroom set up for the ceremony, then guests moved to another location for the cocktail party while the staff quickly and efficiently transforms that same ballroom into the reception room, then you absolutely have to have a site that is experienced with this procedure. Some brides and grooms at casual outdoor weddings do rent chairs for a ceremony in the front yard, then have volunteers move all those chairs into the tent for the reception. That's the arrangement that works best for them. But if the site has one room for the ceremony and another room already set up for the reception, then that's the ideal circumstance. It's up to the couple to choose their site for its transformative properties and visual appeal. Sandra, a mother of the bride reporting from PashWeddings.com says, “We had my daughter's wedding and reception at The Lake Union Café. We had about 75 people show up so it was not very big. We chose to do this because there were a lot of people out of town that did not know Seattle and some elderly people that could not get around on their own. This Café was opened back in the 30's, with marble floors, long full length mirrors and rot iron and wood work. We picked a black and while theme with coat tales and top hats and all. We used just a touch of black ribbon with white roses and for color we used star gazer lilies all over the place. The change from the wedding to the reception was flawless! Everyone moved to the bar area for drinks while they moved the chairs off the dance floor. The tables were already set up so there was not a lot of moving around. I believe you can have your wedding in the same place as your reception as long as the change over is smooth and you are dealing with people that do this on a regular basis, you don't want to inconvenience your guest or stall your wedding.”

The trend in one-location weddings will continue to grow, as wedding expenses are projected to rise by an average of $1,000 a year in the next decade. Couples who want the big, beautiful wedding at an affordable price see this as their dream solution for creating their dream wedding.