The Cabo San Lucas destination wedding,
from your guests' side.

Cabo sits at the tip of the Baja California peninsula, in a desert climate: almost no rain for most of the year, warm days, and cool evenings in winter. The wedding season follows the dry months, from November to May, when daytime highs sit in the high 70s to mid 80s Fahrenheit and the evenings are comfortable for an outdoor reception.

Summer is hot and humid, with highs around 90°F in July and August according to the climate tables published by weather2travel, and the sea is at its warmest, around 29°C (84°F) in late summer according to The Weather Network. The eastern Pacific hurricane season officially runs from May 15 to November 30, and most of the storms that have reached Los Cabos arrived in August, September and October; Hurricane Norma made landfall near Los Cabos as late as October 21, 2023. A date in late November through April is the safe middle.

Tell guests what the weather means for them, not just the temperature. An outdoor ceremony at 4:30 pm in November is warm in the sun and cool by the end of dinner, so a light layer goes in the suitcase. Put that line in the dress code, per event, rather than in a paragraph nobody reads.

Each event can carry its own dress code and time on The Private Wedding App's destination wedding invitation, so the weather advice sits next to the moment it applies to.

Guests fly into Los Cabos International Airport, code SJD, near San José del Cabo, not into Cabo San Lucas itself. According to Cabo Adventures' 2026 guide to the airport, Terminal 2 handles most international arrivals, Terminal 1 mainly domestic flights and some international ones, and a seasonal Terminal 3 opens in the peak winter months. Each terminal has its own exit, so the terminal belongs in your transfer instructions.

The same guide puts the drive from SJD at 20 to 30 minutes to the San José del Cabo hotel zone, 25 to 40 minutes to the resorts along the Tourist Corridor, and 40 to 50 minutes to the Cabo San Lucas marina, with Highway 1 slowing between 3 and 6 pm. Guests have four options: a shared shuttle (about 120 pesos a seat, stopping at several hotels, roughly an hour to Cabo San Lucas), a private transfer booked ahead (from about $120), an authorized airport taxi (about 1,200 to 1,800 pesos to Cabo San Lucas), or a rental car. Uber, Lyft and DiDi can drop guests at the airport but cannot pick them up there.

If you arrange pickups, group them by landing time: three vans at sensible hours rather than a car per guest. That is only possible when you know who lands when, which is why the flight question belongs in the RSVP and not in a group chat.

Guest flight details adds arrival and return flights to the RSVP and sorts every arrival by landing time in your guest list, ready for the transfer company.

Most Cabo weddings run over three days. A welcome party or welcome dinner on the arrival evening, often on the beach or a rooftop, is the first time both families meet. The wedding day follows, usually with a sunset ceremony, a cocktail hour and a long dinner. A farewell brunch on the last morning lets people say goodbye before the airport.

The welcome party and the brunch are often for a smaller circle than the wedding itself, and that is where guests get confused. A colleague who sees the welcome party on the website will assume they are invited. The fix is to give each circle of guests its own link that shows only their events, and to let every guest answer each event separately, so the brunch count stops depending on the Saturday RSVP.

Open the Cabo Talavera demo below the way a guest would: the invitation opens in Spanish first, the schedule is split into day tabs, and the RSVP asks about each moment of the weekend.

Multi-event RSVP gives each guest group its own link and a yes or no per event, with meals and allergies per event for each caterer.

A room block is a set of rooms the hotel holds at a group rate until a cut-off date, after which unbooked rooms go back on general sale. A cut-off around 30 days before arrival is common in hotel wedding contracts; Margaritaville Resorts' wedding FAQ and IHG's courtesy-block policy both use 30 days, and busy Cabo resorts in peak season can ask for more. Read your contract for the exact date and for any attrition clause, which is what you pay if fewer rooms are booked than promised.

That cut-off date is the anchor for everything guests do. Your RSVP deadline should land at least two weeks before it, so you know who is coming while there is still time to release or reassign rooms. Many Cabo couples write it on the invitation in one line: reply by this date, book by that date.

Booking a room is not an RSVP. A guest who booked tells you nothing about the welcome party, their meal, their allergies or the plus-one they meant to ask about. Keep the RSVP as the one place answers are collected, and put the hotel link and booking code on the travel page.

The travel and venue pages of the invitation carry the hotel, the booking code and the cut-off date, editable after sending if the hotel extends it.

The Knot's 2026 Real Weddings Study, based on more than 10,000 US couples married in 2025, puts the average international destination wedding at $43,700 against $32,600 for a hometown wedding. Destination guest lists are much smaller: in The Knot's 2024 study, weddings abroad averaged about 70 guests against 123 at home. In Cabo the spread is wide, because an all-inclusive resort package and a private villa with outside vendors are priced in completely different ways.

The usual etiquette for a destination wedding is that guests pay their own flights and rooms, and the couple pays for the events they host: the welcome party, the wedding and the brunch. Many couples also cover the shuttles on the wedding night, since that is the moment everyone needs to be moved at the same time. Whatever you decide, say it plainly on the travel page so nobody has to ask.

Because catering in Cabo is priced per head and per event, the number that moves the budget most is how many people say yes to each event. Build the catering lines from confirmed answers, not from the invitation list.

The budget tracker keeps deposits and payments in any currency, pesos included, and its catering calculator follows your RSVP meal counts.

Every guest flying to Mexico needs a passport book: a US passport card is accepted at land and sea borders but not for flights. The US State Department's guidance for Mexico is that the passport must be valid for the length of the stay, though some airlines apply stricter rules, so guests should check with their airline; Canadian guests can check the Government of Canada's travel advice for Mexico. At SJD the paper tourist card (FMM) is being phased out for air arrivals: the immigration officer stamps the passport with the authorized stay, up to 180 days, and a digital entry record can be downloaded afterwards.

The practical message to guests, sent with the save the date, is simple: check your passport today, because a renewal takes weeks. It is the single most common reason a guest misses a wedding abroad.

Can you get married legally in Cabo? Yes, but a civil marriage in Mexico requires documents prepared in advance with the local civil registry, usually translated into Spanish and apostilled, so many couples from the US and Canada sign the legal paperwork at home and hold a symbolic ceremony in Cabo. Your planner or venue will have the current list for Baja California Sur.

An info page on the digital invitation holds the passport reminder and the entry notes, and you can show it to one language's guests only if the advice differs.

A Cabo wedding reaches guests three times. The save the date goes out 9 to 12 months ahead with the dates of the weekend, the airport and the passport reminder. The invitation follows about four months before, with the schedule, the travel page and the RSVP. The final details go out two to three weeks before, once you know who lands when. Our guide to the destination wedding itinerary covers that last version in detail, and the destination wedding RSVP deadline guide covers the reply-by date.

If part of the family reads Spanish, write their version natively rather than translating word for word. A formal invitation line in Spanish reads: "Tenemos el honor de invitarles a celebrar nuestra boda el sábado 21 de noviembre en Cabo San Lucas." The reply line: "Favor de confirmar su asistencia antes del 26 de septiembre." Our guide to a bilingual wedding in Mexico has more examples.

Family in Mexico will usually answer on WhatsApp, so send them the link there. Guests in the US and Canada who have an email address can get the automatic reminder emails before the reply-by date.

Start with the Talavera invitation designed around Cabo San Lucas, switch on flights and the RSVP per event, and start planning your Cabo wedding: $19.99 a month or $189 once for the whole wedding planner.

• Save the date, 9 to 12 months out: weekend dates, SJD airport, passport reminder
• Invitation, about 4 months out: schedule by day, travel page, RSVP per event
• Reply-by date at least 2 weeks before the room-block cut-off
• Arrival and return flights in the RSVP, for SJD transfers
• Dress code per event, with the evening temperature
• Who pays for what: flights and rooms, events, shuttles
• Final details 2 to 3 weeks before, on the same link