To think minimoons are ridiculous!?

[GoldenNuggets08]

Can someone explain why the term "minimoon" was invented? Did the tourism/ travel industry come up with it to get even more money from people?

I had a conversation recently with people about where to go on honeymoon, and a significant proportion of the group were going on "minimoon" shortly after the wedding to places like Italy, Malta, Portugal, Greece, Croatia..... and then 6-12 months after the wedding were doing a bigger trip like safari in South Africa or Mexico... surely the "minimoon" is the honeymoon and the other trip is just a holiday??? It's a bit "you went to Tenerife, I went to Elevenerife"...

We had a couple of days in York immediately after the wedding then a longer honeymoon in the states - week in NY and two weeks in Florida. Married at Christmas so wanted to just unwind for a couple of days then have proper honeymoon later

By your logic, you also shouldn’t call a ‘honeymoon’ a ‘honeymoon’. It’s just a holiday!

A minimoon is a short break following a wedding
A Honeymoon is more of an extravagance, treat holiday of a lifetime. It’s not that deep!

No one is forced to have either!

I don’t understand why people get so wound up by insignificant things! Unless you have felt inferior when people have assumed that your European, 4 day break is a minimoon. Otherwise why would anyone even care!?

The person I quoted and was replying to said this: "A lot of it is probably people who asked for cash/ contributions to the big holiday as their wedding gift - so need to know what gifted money they have got to spend." I was saying that this isn't the case with the people who I know because they already have the holiday booked, so instead of saying "it's not about waiting to see what contributions are made before they can see what they can afford" I simple shortened it to "it's not about money".

Yeh so true, in a later post I said I was going to call it a holiday going forward. I think as someone else said I link "honeymoons" to timing rather than level of extravagance, so that answers my question really. And also that in my opinion a lot of the "minimoon"s are quite extravagant!

Just another way to extract money, see also Babymoon.

Pretty much everything about modern weddings is ridiculous, but yeah.

We did this. We wanted to go to Japan and saved up. We have a week off after the wedding booked - and I won a pair of tickets to Rome (RIP FlyBe) so it seemed like kismet.

I think it’s a good idea actually. A small holiday after the wedding which has been costly both time wise and money wise.

Things evolve - hen and stag do’s were originally a night out the day before the wedding. I don’t necessarily agree with them being so costly for everyone but all those people who must have walked down the aisle feeling like death warmed up when it was the night before. Which must have been a long time back actually as it had moved to the previous week when I married in the 1990s.

I agree with you - your 'honeymoon' is the first holiday after your wedding, whether it's a six week safari in Africa or a weekend in a caravan at Cleethorpes; whether it happens the day after the wedding or three months after the wedding.

Any later holidays are just 'holidays'.

Minimoon/honeymoon smacks of 'look at me' Instagram culture - they think they'll get more 'likes' for a honeymoon than a mere holiday.

I think the phrasing is used by people who don’t want others to think that a few days away is all they can afford for their honeymoon. They don’t want anyone thinking “oh, is that all they did for their honeymoon? Poor them.”

I agree. In my opinion, honeymoon is a holiday after a wedding, not a once in a lifetime holiday. It might also be a once a lifetime holiday, but that’s not what makes it a honeymoon.

For some reason which I forget, my mum and dad couldn't get away on their honeymoon until about ten months after their wedding, by which time my mum had conceived my older brother - around three months after the wedding - and so was very visibly pregnant. They had booked the honeymoon suite and so it was obvious that they were new(ish)ly weds. This was in 1967, and my poor mum got some funny looks from some people who thought it must have been a shotgun wedding, when nothing could have been further from the truth. Very different times.

What does it matter. It's just a label. A honeymoon is a holiday and so is a minimoon.

We did this because we got married in winter and the place we wanted to go on honeymoon was not pleasant to visit at that time of year. So went for 4 days to Scotland and then went for 3 weeks the following summer on honeymoon. Agree with others about leave from work, we couldn’t take much more leave after the wedding and certainly not 3 weeks worth.

I personally feel it’s nothing for you to worry about and nothing for you to feel anything about.

I am glad we moved away from that.
Whatever your virginal status, I am not keen on sharing to the world that I am planning on having sex that week, or that night 😂

No one needs to be informed of my private life.

At least we don't expose sheets with blood stains anymore (stains more or less genuine...)

Cool

My honeymoon was a weekend in Brussels 😂. It was fun, and yes special because we'd just got married the day before. For the sake of propriety we told people we would do an expensive real honeymoon later, then just quietly didn't bother...
Edited for typos

I thought mimimoon meant a night or two in a hotel in the UK straight after the wedding - not going abroad! I agree that’s silly, the second one is then just a holiday surely

We had a 'minimoon' after the wedding knowing a) we would be knackered and not want to do a holiday of a lifetime, which for us would be quite active and b) because we had no money having spent what we had (not loads) on the wedding and wanted to use any money we were given as a wedding present for the honeymoon (we didn't ask for any but knew people would be kind). Not a fan of the word but that doesn't seem to be your issue

I thought this post referred to those little Japanese ice cream balls and was definitely YABU as they are delicious!

I think they started becoming more than that when local hotel stays got ridiculously expensive and people realised they could get a holiday abroad for the same money and it snowballed from there! The whole wedding industry has become ridiculous. I dunno where it'll stop

Probably because their ideal honeymoon is slightly different from yours and they want to do a longer, more exotic trip. Often our summer, which is prime wedding season, coincides with rain in tropical areas so they need to go later on. Or they need to save up (we still haven’t been on our ideal honeymoon as we couldn’t afford it, and we’ve been married nearly 20 years!). As someone said, they’re all just holidays.

From reading the responses, it seems like there's a difference in what people consider a honeymoon to be. I've always thought it referred to a holiday, whether extravagant or not, taken by the newlyweds immediately following the wedding. In this case, even if you go on a trip of a lifetime at a later point, that's not your honeymoon, so the term minimoon is redundant.

But it seems as though some people think a honeymoon is a big extravagant trip of a lifetime at some point following the wedding, if not immediately afterwards. In that case, it makes sense that you might also have a smaller holiday right after the wedding and not call it your honeymoon. It makes sense, but I disagree. The trip right after your wedding is your honeymoon. The big extravagant trip is just a really awesome holiday - and good for you!

We did this. 5 nights in Europe then 6 months later went for a 3 week trip to Australia. The wedding date and Australian early summer didn’t marry up so we waited. We classed Australia as our honeymoon as it was a bucket list/ once in a lifetime trip.