Banyan Tree Mayakoba Wedding Photographer

The Weddings We Photograph Among These Villas

Almost every wedding we are asked for at this resort uses the buildings as much as the beach, and these three use them most. Each one has its own guide.

The Full Wedding, Garden to Ballroom

Getting ready in the villa, the first look on your own terrace, the ceremony, the dinner and the dance floor — with a second photographer once the guest list passes a certain size, because a garden aisle and a room full of waiting faces happen in two places at once. Our destination wedding photography timeline shows how the hours are spent when the day moves through four different sets.

Elopements and Small Weddings Inside a Pool Villa

Thirty guests on the terrace, or nobody at all but the two of you. Small numbers travel light here: one space, dinner where your guests already are, and portraits that take the whole evening because there is no schedule to serve. An LGBTQ+ wedding is built exactly the same way. Read our guide to eloping on this coast and the intimate wedding guide.

Vow Renewals, and the Symbolic Ceremony That Follows

A promise said again in the garden where somebody else said it first, with a family that has grown since. Renewals carry no paperwork whatsoever, which is why couples give them the best hour of the evening rather than the convenient one. Our vow renewal guide covers how one is planned.

Where an Asian Resort Puts a Caribbean Wedding

Banyan Tree began in Southeast Asia, and this is its only address in Mexico — a fact you can read straight off the buildings. The resort keeps a good handful of spaces for weddings and they do not photograph anything like one another. The Mayapan garden is the shaded, green one, and it carries the brand’s Thai signature more visibly than anywhere else on the grounds. The Lobby Terrace stands out over the water. There is a chapel in the manner of a Mexican hacienda, and the Mayapan ballroom next to it, painted and tiled for an evening when the weather has other ideas. Sur Beach is the open one. Which of them is free on your date is a question for the resort wedding office; which of them suits the wedding you have just described to us is a question for the conversation.

Getting Ready in a Villa That Photographs Like a Set

Almost nothing about the morning of a wedding here resembles the morning of a wedding at a big beach hotel. There are no standard rooms on this property at all: every key opens a villa with a pool of its own, a terrace and a wall around both. The dress goes on inside a building with vaulted ceilings and stone underfoot, which means the getting-ready set is already finished before we arrive — no bathroom mirrors, no hallway carpet, no hunting for a window that faces the right way.

It changes the shape of the hours, too. The first look does not have to happen in a public part of the resort, because there is a terrace outside your own door and nobody on it. That is worth raising early with us, since it decides whether we start the day in one villa or in two.

Wedding Light Under a Garden Canopy and Out on the Sand

The sun comes out of the sea in the morning here and drops behind the trees at the end of the day, so a wedding on these grounds gets two very different kinds of light rather than one long slide into gold. The garden is the interesting one: dense planting breaks the sun into patches, which is unforgiving at noon and beautiful once the sun is low enough to come in sideways. The beach is the simple one. We generally build the ceremony to start about two hours before sundown, so the vows, the family groupings and an unhurried portrait set all land while the colour holds.

The date does the rest of the arithmetic. Sundown drifts by around ninety minutes between December and June, so the same start time finishes in gold one month and in the dark another; we anchor your timeline to the real sunset for your day. Our notes on the best months to get married on this coast map that drift, along with heat, rain and sargassum.

And if one evening is never going to be enough, the morning after is quiet and the dress is already ruined. A trash-the-dress or day-after session puts you back in the garden with no ceremony to keep and nobody to gather.

One Line in the Budget: the Fee for an Outside Photographer

Resorts in this bracket charge an outside photographer a fee, and the amount depends on the property and on the package you book. Ask the wedding office for the figure in writing early, while there is still room to plan around it — it is a line in a budget, not an obstacle, and the couples who ask in month one never give it another thought. We take the subject apart in our guide to outside-photographer vendor fees at Riviera Maya resorts, and we set an independent photographer beside the one bundled into a package in resort photographer versus your own.

Paperwork at Home, Vows Under the Timber

A civil marriage in Mexico is legal, straightforward and slower: witnesses, documents and a tighter clock on the day itself. A great many couples sign at home instead and hold a symbolic ceremony here, which loosens the schedule and looks identical through a lens. Settle it before we draft your timeline, because it decides how early the garden has to be ready.

Arriving ahead of the wedding, or staying on after it? Our Banyan Tree Mayakoba photographer page covers the engagement hour and the surprise proposal we build by message weeks in advance, and a flying dress photoshoot at Banyan Tree Mayakoba is what brides book when they want one more frame before the flight home.