We were really honoured to be asked to contribute — and it was great to see that our debate opponent didn’t actually disagree too much with our view that what’s important to guests is the feeling that they’re giving you a special treat instead of having their gift measured only by the amount they’ve spent.

The new issue also features a 22-page special on weddings abroad, and a roundup of the world’s sexiest honeymoons. Check it out!

We asked Mark and Denise a few questions about their experiences as The Honeymoon Testers, their amazing world record attempt, and their own honeymoon to Singapore, Indonesia, Australia and Bali. Here’s their fantastic video response:

Thanks ever so much to Mark and Denise for taking the time to answer our questions in such detail, and for their kind words about Buy Our Honeymoon!

We never delete your honeymoon gift list, so you can always review your plans, even years later. Mark and Denise have been generous enough to allow us to show you their actual wedding list — it’s a brilliant example of our category, item photos and currency conversion features, and includes some wonderful charitable and eco gift donations mixed in with honeymoon experiences and accommodation.

You can keep track of Mark and Denise’s journeys at their blog, and on Twitter. We’d like to wish them every success with the Ultimate Job — and the very best of luck with their world record attempt!

Some of our customers choose to receive cash or cheques in a card on the day of their wedding, or leave details on making a balance transfer to their bank account, but the majority set up their honeymoon registry to allow guests to make an immediate online payment to them using a credit or debit card.

We’re occasionally asked whether we support any online payment systems other than PayPal for this. Although we’d love to, regrettably we currently can’t.

We need any online payment system we support to do the following:

• It must allow individuals — not just businesses — to set up an account to receive credit card payments. This rules out all but a handful of payment service providers out there.
• It mustn’t require guests to set up their own account in order to pay. If you follow our guide to setting up your PayPal account, your guests won’t need a PayPal account of their own.
• It must permit use of an account to collect gift contributions. Google Checkout, for example, expressly forbids use of the service for “fund solicitations”, precluding its use for a honeymoon registry.

We’d very much like to be able to offer couples a choice of supported online payment systems, but we’ve yet to find anything other than PayPal which satisfies all three of the above requirements. If you know of a supplier we should look at, please do get in touch.

This prompted us to check our database. Were our couples being given more back when we started than they are now? Or does our wedding list service buck the national trend?

We decided to check only the value of gifts that we knew had been paid to couples through PayPal, excluding cash gifts altogether.  Although many of our customers choose not to collect their gifts online using a PayPal account, including these gifts would make it harder for us to know which gifts were paid and which were tests of the system that hadn’t been deleted from a couple’s Gift History. We felt, therefore, we’d get a more accurately representative sample by focussing only on those gifts we knew to have been paid online.

For gifts paid in British pounds, the average gift value bought on our site in 2008 was £43.13, which rose in 2009 to £45.27, and has risen again this year to £47.47.

Similarly, the average US dollar gift was $80.23 in 2008, which fell to $78.52 in 2009, but has leaped back to a brilliant $86.02 this year.

And since going live in 2007, we’ve had gifts paid in 11 different currencies. The stats show that 2009 was a bumper year for the Euro (with gifts averaging €97.77), and only gifts paid in Canadian dollars are of a lower average value this year than last.

So we’re very pleased to note that, contrary to the general trend elsewhere, guests using buy-our-honeymoon.com are even more generous now than two years ago — and they’ve always been more generous than the national average!

For help with making your honeymoon wishlist as fun for your guests as it is for you, check out our ten top tips on how to make the most of your wedding gift list.

Our new system to automatically log PayPal gift payments is working brilliantly, and means that we can now be much more confident that if we don’t have transaction information recorded for a gift, it’s because payment didn’t go through. In turn, this means that the gift reminder emails you can send to guests could state this more clearly.

As before, our reminder emails politely repeat the original confirmation message sent when the guest first reserved the gift from your registry, but they also now state that the transaction has yet to be fully completed.  We’ve also tweaked some of the other wording in both the reminder and original notification emails, together with including our telephone number for queries if you’re based in the UK or EU.

On the subject of wording, we had an email from one of our customers pointing out that the search box on our homepage didn’t use gender-neutral vocabulary in asking for the surname of “either the bride or groom”.  We like to think we’re very careful about this, but sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to spot something we’ve missed.

We’d also had in mind for a while that asking for a wedding date was also too limiting, since a lot of our customers have a destination wedding, with guests attending a big celebration later on.

So, we’ve adjusted the search form to try to address both of these issues. The form can be seen on our main homepage, and is also the focus of the homepages for each of our optional domains, such as our-wedding-list.co.uk. We hope the changes are subtle enough that many people wouldn’t notice!

Finally, we’ve made a small change to the form guests use to reserve gifts from your site. Shortly after we launched, we added in the option for guests to be able to modify the value of their gift. We had three situations in mind where this might be useful:

1. You’ve asked for 2x Spa Treatments (one for you, one for your partner). A guest can now buy you both with a single gift.
2. You’re asking for contributions towards a larger single cost, such as upgrading your air fare to First Class. You can now include the full cost of the item on your list and you guests can contribute whatever gift value they’re most comfortable with.
3. You’ve asked for a pair of cinema tickets. A guest can now add in a little extra to their gift for popcorn and a coke.

The first of these was made redundant in March 2008, when we launched the option whereby you can ask for a specific number of gifts for any item. Then, in February 2009, we added a way of creating items that allow for a completely open contribution. That left only the third situation — and, as it turned out, very few guests ever actually did this.

So we’ve now removed the editable gift value box for most types of gift on the site.  Open contributions, of course, still request a gift value, as does the gift suggestion section at the foot of your registry page.

As always, we’ll keep looking for further improvements and clarifications we can make, and keep you posted right here.  Don’t forget, you can also find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter, for the very latest news!

Since last September, we’ve delayed sending these emails for an hour, so that guests have an opportunity to cancel any gifts that had been reserved by mistake. This has proved to be a very useful system, but once a guest has made successful payment for a gift into your PayPal account, there’s no good reason to delay the notification emails to both you and your guests — so we now send them as soon as we get the transaction details from PayPal.

We also now include the PayPal transaction details in our email to you, so you have a record of these independently of the Gift History page in your Buy Our Honeymoon account.  Similarly, if a guest indicates that they intend to pay for a gift by cash or cheque, we’ll send notification to you right away, and indicate their intent in the message.

Of course, if you’ve chosen to keep your wedding gifts a surprise, we’ll only send an email to your guest, confirming the details of their gift.

If you have any queries regarding this, or your honeymoon gift list in general, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, or to leave a comment below.

However, because payments are made into your account and not ours, we couldn’t always be certain whether a transaction had completed successfully.  The screen on PayPal that’s shown to guests includes a button to return them to your honeymoon gift list, but if a guest didn’t click it, we wouldn’t be able to determine the status of the transaction. Your guest’s payment would have gone through, but your Gift History in your Buy Our Honeymoon account would show “TBC”.

We’ve now been able to implement a system where PayPal informs us automatically, even though we’re a third-party to the transaction, whenever a successful payment has been made.

This means that we’ll be able to record the PayPal transaction ID for almost all gifts made in future through the site. Most guests do click the button to return to the site — but this new system should cover those that don’t, and make your Gift History a far more comprehensive record of payments that have been made into your account.

There’s a setting within your PayPal account that you can use, however, to disable these instant payment notifications, and if you’ve done this, we’ll still depend on your guests clicking the button to notify us manually. If you haven’t changed your profile to explicitly disable this, however, the new notification system will now already be at work for you. If you think you might have done, do please get in touch and we’ll go through with you how to check.

If you have any queries about this, or payments into your honeymoon account in general, please contact us and we’ll be glad to help.

But of course, the details behind the headline get even more interesting:

…forty-five per cent prefer their guests to give them money as opposed to 29 per cent wanting gifts from a wedding list and the same figure (27%) opting for vouchers for a honeymoon

We’re all three options simultaneously! Buy Our Honeymoon is a wedding list service where you get cash gifts to spend on your honeymoon.

We don’t provide vouchers as such (though our guest Gift Certificates arguably come close) — but we’re genuinely unsure how our customers would respond to this question. Do let us know in the comments, or on our Facebook page!

Building a honeymoon wedding list, detailing activities, experiences and upgrades to help make your holiday the trip of a lifetime, helps your guests to better engage with your wishes. Guests like to feel that their gifts are contributing something tangible to your happiness as a couple, and don’t want their affection for you to be measured only financially. Even the most sceptical guests can become spellbound by the romance of a personal, detailed honeymoon gift list, and feel reassured that they’re giving you a really special treat instead of merely contributing to an anonymous pot of cash.

When we built Buy Our Honeymoon five years ago for our own wedding, we found that our friends and family became part of our honeymoon in ways we could never have expected, bringing a part of their own personality and their unique relationship with us into the gifts they reserved.

For ideas on how to ask for honeymoon money in a romantic, polite, and creative way, take a look at our sample honeymoon gift lists — and don’t forget to check out our top tips on how to make the most of your honeymoon wishlist.

We sincerely hope that the travel situation will start to return to normal, but the ongoing chaos may well mean that you have to make last-minute alterations to your plans even now.

If you have wedding insurance, it’s worth checking to see if you’re covered for any disruption. It seems that most insurance companies won’t cover for “Acts of God” — including the Icelandic volcano — but customers of Ecclesiastical are covered.

If you need to dramatically change your plans, do remember that the gifts made through your honeymoon gift list were bought purely because your friends and family want you to have a fantastic time. No-one will mind if their gift for one experience is used for something different.

Typically, our lists are closed one month after your wedding date — but we’re more than happy to extend this for as long as you need.  If you have to postpone your travel arrangements, do just let us know when you’d like your list to close instead and we’ll arrange that for you right away.

And if you’d like us to help you make adjustments to your honeymoon registry pages as a result of the current situation, we’ll be happy to help in any way we can, free of charge.  Do please contact us.

Photo by Sverrir Thor.

It’s our third birthday!

We had lots of ideas, but no clue how successful it would become. Since then, we’ve served thousands of couples and tens of thousands of guests, who’ve reserved gifts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, across dozens of currencies.

There have been registries for honeymoons spanning over a hundred countries across every continent — including Antarctica! — and several honeymoons circumnavigating the globe.  From knitting yarn to valet parking, doggy-boarding to an alpaca jumper, we’re always thrilled by the creativity, romance and wit shown by couples using the site.

One of the things that surprised us most, though, was how international the site would become. We’ve had customers from over 30 different countries, as well as the UK, USA and Canada, and we couldn’t be more grateful for their trust. It’s always so exciting to see new registries from couples in Australia, Singapore, Brazil, Hong Kong, Sweden or Dubai.

In this past year, we’ve improved the site so that you can now upload your own photos to customise your theme, download your Gift History, list your items in an ever-increasing range of currencies, with extra preferences, options and free additional services. We’ve added our most popular theme yet, and been Highly Commended in the UK’s national wedding awards.

We’ve got lots more planned for the year ahead — including some really big news coming very soon — but do please keep sending us your ideas and feedback. We really do want to provide you with the best service we possibly can.

Thanks to you all for another great year!