Bekki & Glen — The Wedding That Waited Four Years for Villa Jia

Bekki first wrote to us in February 2019 about a wedding for April 2020 — Villa Jia on Natai Beach, eighty guests, a beachfront ceremony. Four years, three postponed dates and one very patient couple later, she and Glen were finally married at the same villa they had chosen on that first viewing — on 9 April 2023, for a little over seventy guests.

The first email, February 2019

Bekki reached out to us in early 2019, planning a wedding for April 2020 — eighty guests, a beachfront villa, and a clear sense of what she and Glen, then living and working in Kuala Lumpur, wanted from their day. We sent through a shortlist of larger villas that could comfortably host a wedding their size. It didn't take long for one name to keep coming up in her replies: Villa Jia, on the beach at Natai.

"We actually really like Villa Jia, it is beautiful," she wrote, and asked if we could arrange a viewing the next time she and Glen were in Phuket. A few weeks later, they flew in, we picked them up from their hotel, and walked the villa together. That was it — decision made, deposit paid, and the real planning began.

What followed over the rest of 2019 was the kind of back-and-forth that makes a wedding feel truly personal rather than templated. Glen, ever the details person — a senior banker by trade, it showed — sent us long, thorough emails working through menus, music and logistics. At one point he apologised for "the somewhat mad clarifications... multiple questions back and forth" — but that thoroughness became one of the most enjoyable parts of planning with them. By February 2020, with the wedding just weeks away, we'd worked through almost every detail: a Sunday recovery brunch was traded for late-night Wagyu beef sliders instead, the live band's set times were fine-tuned to keep the evening's energy right, and Bekki asked for a small, thoughtful touch — matching wrist corsages for both mothers, "to feel special on the day."

We were, by early March 2020, about as close to finished as a wedding plan gets.

Then the world stopped

Two weeks before their wedding date, everything changed. Thailand's borders were closing. International flights were being cancelled. On 14 March 2020 we wrote to the villa on Bekki and Glen's behalf: "despite the best efforts with all stakeholders with the current virus situations and now the severe travel restrictions, Rebecca & Glen are looking to postpone their wedding."

It was the first of three postponements, and it's worth being honest about what that actually looked like from our side of the desk — because it wasn't a single clean decision, it was nearly three years of watching the situation, checking in, and re-planning around a world that kept changing its mind. October 2020 was the first new date, agreed within days of the original cancellation. By August 2020, with Glen candidly telling us "COVID is even slowing down my UAE visa process," we moved again — this time towards Easter 2021, to work around family flying in from the UK. Thailand's shifting quarantine and "Sandbox" entry rules pushed the date again, to April 2022. And finally, in early 2022, with still no certainty on international travel, Bekki and Glen made the call to move to April 2023 — the date that, at last, held.

Through all of it, they never once considered going elsewhere. That says something about trust, and it's the part of this story we're proudest of.

Picking up where we left off

By November 2022, with the wedding finally back on solid ground, we picked the planning back up almost exactly where it had left off nearly three years earlier. Hair and makeup needed rebooking. Glen, reviewing the quote, was refreshingly candid — "wow that's expensive... I might look elsewhere for the bridesmaids" — and we found him a fair, previously-negotiated rate instead. It was a good reminder that even after years of working together, we were still partners looking out for their budget, not just processing an order.

Through February and March 2023, the final details came together fast: a full wedding-day schedule, a live band split into three carefully timed sets, a finalised speech order (Father of the Bride, Groom, Maid of Honour, Best Man — five minutes each), and a switch to photographer Jaran Images, on our recommendation, who ended up capturing the day beautifully. Glen sent us the last edits to the ceremony script himself — by this point, after years of revisions, there was barely anything left to change.

There was even a small last-minute request that says everything about how far the relationship had come: with a young baby now in tow, Glen asked if the villa could offer an earlier check-in "so we don't want to hang around in the heat for 3 hours with a baby." The villa couldn't move check-in, so instead we arranged a relaxed late lunch at their hotel and met them ourselves at 4pm for one final pre-wedding conversation before the celebrations began.

The wedding — 9 April 2023

On 9 April 2023, Bekki and Glen were married at Villa Jia — the same villa they had fallen for on a viewing four years earlier. Seventy-plus guests gathered for a beach ceremony, sunset canapés, a live band through dinner, and — fittingly — those late-night Wagyu sliders that had replaced the Sunday brunch idea back in 2020, finally served exactly as planned.

Why this one stays with us

A month later, we shared their finished photographs and closed their file with the words we mean every time: "It was a pleasure planning with you both. If you do move to Phuket, please let us know."

Every destination wedding planner has a "we made it happen despite everything" story from the pandemic years. Bekki and Glen's is ours. What made it work wasn't luck — it was a couple who stayed engaged and communicative through years of uncertainty, and a planning relationship built on enough trust that three postponements never once became a reason to walk away. Four years after that first email about Villa Jia, they got the wedding they'd been picturing all along.