Is Las Vegas a good place to get married?
According to the Clark County Recorder’s Office, just under 81,000 weddings were performed in Las Vegas in 2014, down 37% from a high of 126,000 in 2004. Many of these take place in the Las Vegas wedding chapels, of course, while others are in more traditional venues, including the more than 500 places of worship to which Las Vegas is home, plus the Office of Civil Marriages downtown. Still others take place in private gardens, in hot-air balloons and helicopters, on horseback, even in gondolas.
If you want to be kidnapped by cowboys, beamed up by Captain Kirk, serenaded by Elvis, married in the front car of a roller coaster, or at a drive-thru wedding window, Vegas is definitely the venue for you.
There are approximately 60 wedding chapels in and around Las Vegas. An exact count is difficult for various reasons, but five dozen is pretty close. These stand-alone chapels vary quite widely in aesthetics, cleanliness, and the comportment of the managers, while the casino chapels are (usually) classier, though they can be more expensive and harder to book. To some extent, you get what you pay for, which can be anything from less than $100 for a quickie ceremony by a “Marryin’ Sam” (officiate) at the Fragrant Garden Chapel and Chop Shop or others of that ilk up to $20,000 or more for the super-deluxe package at one of the five-star resorts, and that’s before you’ve started popping the bubbly.
Receptions are easy to arrange, given that every hotel has meeting and reception facilities that can handle four to 400 and all kinds of restaurants on-site.
Wedding coordinators are common at the hotels as well as the chapels and they can steer you in the right direction.
Finally, if you get married in Las Vegas, you’re already in the number-one honeymoon destination for Americans (ahead of Hawaii at number two and Jamaica at number three).
