Planning Your Trip to Colorado

Once you’ve decided Colorado is the right fit, the next planning question isn’t legal. It’s logistical. This is the ordinary “trip planning” work of any vacation, but with a couple of Colorado-specific wrinkles worth knowing about before you book anything.

Flights: fly into Denver

Denver (DEN) has the cheapest and most plentiful flight options into Colorado, by a wide margin. Unless your ceremony location is dramatically closer to a smaller regional airport, Denver is almost always the right call for an international itinerary: more carriers, more routes, more competitive pricing.

Fares and hotel rates also shift with the season, not just the route. See the best time to get married in Colorado for how weather, crowds, and cost seasons line up (or don’t) before you lock in dates.

A rental car isn’t optional

If you take away one thing from this post: budget for a rental car, not just a taxi or rideshare plan. This isn’t a “nice to have” in Colorado the way it might be in a dense city with good public transit. A few reasons why:

• The county clerk’s office where you get your license, the apostille office in Denver, and any wilderness or mountain ceremony site can all be far apart from each other, and far from the airport.
• Each county runs its own separate booking and office process, so if your ceremony location and your license county aren’t the same, you’re realistically making multiple separate stops, on separate days or legs of the trip.
• Mountain roads and trailhead access points are often not well served by rideshare apps at all, especially outside the Denver metro area.

Where to stay: pick your base

There’s no single right answer here. It depends on what you’re optimizing for:

• Staying centrally in Denver is the more convenient choice if you’re treating the license-and-apostille errands as the priority to get through efficiently. Everything admin-related is close, and you can day-trip to the mountains for the ceremony itself.
• Basing near the mountains (e.g. closer to Rocky Mountain National Park or another scenic ceremony site) suits couples who are prioritizing the ceremony location and scenery over errand-running convenience, and don’t mind a longer drive into Denver for the paperwork stops.

We haven’t nailed down specific hotel-area or drive-time recommendations yet (e.g. exact minutes from a given Denver neighborhood to a given county clerk’s office, or to RMNP). Treat “pick your base” as a framework for now, not a specific itinerary.

Get a travel eSIM before you land

Set up a travel eSIM before you arrive so you have data for maps, navigation, and email from the moment you land. See our dedicated post on picking an eSIM provider, and note the important gotcha that most travel eSIMs are data-only, with no dialable US phone number, which matters on at least one Colorado form later in the process.

Putting the itinerary together

A workable rough shape for a lot of couples: fly into Denver, pick up a rental car same day, handle the license and (later) apostille errands from a central base, then relocate to a mountain base for the ceremony itself and any photos. Adjust the order based on your county clerk’s office location and your ceremony site, but build the rental car and the Denver errands into the plan from the start, not as an afterthought.