My friend Jackie attended a sumptuous wedding reception at a Cheshire hotel.

She only knew the groom’s parents, who had invited her, but she happily sipped champagne, congratulated the smiling bride and chatted away to fellow guests on the terrace. Some 20 minutes into her arrival, she felt a tap on her arm to find the groom’s mother with a bemused look on her face.

“Jackie, what are you doing in here?” asked the mother. “Chris and Anne’s wedding reception is next door.”

This anecdote illustrates two points about weddings. The first is that the majority of UK nuptials fall into a similar pattern of bride in white dress, colour co-ordinated napkins and chicken dinners. The second is that often the bride and groom only know about half their guests: the rest are relatives who previously have only been names on Christmas cards but who get invited out of fear of causing offence. I’ve also been to a couple of weddings where it was apparent the parents were using it as an opportunity to catch up with people they hadn’t seen for a few years.

A good way to avoid guest list politics is to take your wedding abroad, where the cost of flights, hotel accommodation and the fact there are no PG Tips available may deter a few of the older, more distant relatives. And the other benefit is that you really know who your friends are when you’re asking them to risk losing their luggage and patience on a low-cost airline flight.

Last year a poll carried out by YouGov for Direct Line Home Insurance revealed that around 400,000 couples had married overseas in the previous two years*.

And since Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes chose the region for their own lavish ceremony last November, Tuscany in Italy has apparently increased in popularity as a wedding celebration destination.

Images of Holmes and Cruise sweeping through aristocratic rooms and posing in fairy-like grottos have sent brides-to-be into a frenzy of romantic demands. Why arrive at your reception in a hired car, when you can be guided by candlelight through a jasmine garden to eat al fresco?

James Lord, co-founder of the high-end Tuscan wedding planning service Love & Lord, says that his business has steadily increased since it was set up some seven years ago, and this year he has seen a 400 per cent rise.

“Most couples are looking for informality, but with the wow factor,” he says. “Many of them have been to friend’s weddings in the UK or abroad and are aiming to do something different.”

Lord, who established the business with his wife Helen after their own Tuscan wedding, says the attraction is that couples really can have the fairytale setting.

This was the reason for Nicola and Brian Cavanagh choosing Tuscany over London, where they both live, or Dublin, where Brian is from, or Birmingham, where Nicola is from.

“We felt that our wedding was a lot more bespoke and fairytale,” says Nicola, a sales manager with United Biscuits. “The venue was amazing and it really made a difference by making a weekend out of it.”

Nicola, who met Brian during a weekend trip to London with her girlfriends, says the great thing for them about getting married abroad was that their 60 guests, who had travelled from six different countries, had made a real effort to be there.

“Everyone was in a 'foreign' country and so the wedding party bonded really well over the course of the weekend,” she adds. “As one guest put it, we “have set the bar high” for anyone else who might be thinking of getting married.”

Weddings, whether in the UK or abroad, are an expensive undertaking if a bride and groom want all the bells and whistles. However, the difference between spending upwards of £17,000 in the UK and spending it in Tuscany is the hiring of an Italian castle, wine straight from the cellar of a vineyard, and good weather.

Helen Lord says the catering is an especially seductive element of a Tuscan wedding. Love & Lord have a special relationship with Dario Cecchini, the butcher/restaurateur featured in Jamie Oliver’s Channel 4 series, Jamie’s Great Escape. But in Italy, food is the real celebrity. No re-heated vegetables or rubber meat on a Tuscan table; this is where mushrooms or tomatoes taste so good they are served with just a dash of olive oil.

When a couple is making their entrance from the terrace of lush Tuscan gardens to feast on local, mouth-watering dishes, you can understand why they passed over that Hilton hotel conference room.

*For information on the legal aspects of getting married abroad visit the General Register Office.