my best friend since high school told me the price I'd have to pay to go to his bachelor party in vegas--I laughed and said have fun dude. he said ok, cya afterwards
the wedding was one of the few good ones I've been to, and i gave a great best man speech
I thought a destination wedding was basically an elopement, like you are trying to really cull your guest list. Never felt bad about sending a no to those, always figured that's what they were aiming for.
I know some people that went and got married in Thailand. They're really good friends but I was not paying to go to Thailand just to watch their wedding, and then come home again, it's not worth it. They had a much larger wedding back home for everyone else a couple of weeks later on a weekend in the local area.
When you have a destination wedding that's what everyone expects you to do. Inevitably a lot of people aren't going to come because friend groups all tend to get married around the same time and if everyone wants to have a destination wedding then I'm not going to have any money left.
If you're at the RSVP stage for a destination wedding, surely that would be at least 6-8 months in advance of the date...
Why would you expect people to fill out your wedding registry by then? In my experience, folks only start paying attention in the last month before the event.
Besides the obvious implications…
Hawaii would definitely be more expensive than Thailand unless they picked some 5 star hotel in a remote area. Even then it would probably be close. Hawaii is atrociously expensive.