Kuoni

Kuoni is a Swiss travel company whose footer describes it as "Reiseerfahrung seit mehr als 120 Jahren", travel experience for more than 120 years, and hochzeitsreise.kuoni.ch is its separate site for honeymoons. The site sells one idea above all: book your honeymoon with Kuoni and you get your own wedding website, through which family and friends can give you part of the trip as a wedding present.

What the honeymoon site offers

The page is short and built around a few headings. The top line calls a Kuoni honeymoon "das schönste Geschenk für Brautpaare", the most beautiful gift for a bridal couple, and invites couples to book moments in "den romantischsten Destinationen weltweit", the most romantic destinations worldwide.

The text that follows is scene-setting rather than a catalog. It talks about extending the most beautiful day of your life with a honeymoon, about time alone together, white sandy beaches and a glass of wine at sunset. A second section calls the honeymoon the start of shared adventures, a time for voyages of discovery and for being pampered from head to toe. The practical line in it is the promise of advice: "Wir beraten Sie gerne bei der Planung Ihrer Hochzeitsreise, individuell und kompetent", Kuoni is happy to advise on planning your honeymoon, individually and competently.

Below that are links to Kuoni Specialists, a Honeymoon Magalog (Kuoni's magazine-catalog for honeymoons), a list of honeymoons ("Zu den Hochzeitsreisen"), a travel agency finder ("Reisebürofinder") and a questions and advice section. The honeymoon trips themselves, their destinations and prices, sit behind those links rather than on this page.

The wedding website

This is the feature that makes the page worth a listing. In Kuoni's words, "Wir schenken Ihnen bei Buchung Ihrer Honeymoon-Reise eine eigene Hochzeitswebsite, die Sie individuell gestalten können": when you book your honeymoon, Kuoni gives you your own wedding website, which you can design as you like.

The page lists three uses for it. You can tell guests about the upcoming wedding celebration. You can make giving easy: with one click, anyone can contribute an amount of their choice ("mit einem Wunschbetrag") toward your trip. And afterward, as a thank-you, you can make selected moments from the honeymoon available to relatives and friends on the same site. A sample honeymoon page ("Honeymoon Musterseite") is linked so couples can see what one looks like before committing.

The terms of use at the bottom of the page add the details. The website is a service Kuoni provides to couples who book their honeymoon directly with Kuoni. The couple gets their own login to build and manage it, and the login link at the top of the page is labeled for both couples and guests. The site can be protected with a password, so that only a group of people the couple defines (the terms give the wedding guests as the example) can see it. Kuoni says it takes no liability for the content or use of the personal website, and that it does not pass on the couple's data to third parties or use it for commercial purposes.

For a Swiss-international couple with family in several countries, this is a practical answer to wedding gifts: one link, a contribution in any amount, and no need for relatives abroad to ship anything.

The cancellation fee

The terms contain one figure, and it is worth knowing before you share the website with guests. If the honeymoon is canceled, specifically if more than half of the total honeymoon amount is canceled, or if the couple uses the honeymoon website but then does not book a trip, Kuoni charges a flat fee of CHF 250.- for administration and for its help in designing the personal website. Further costs, credit card fees in particular, are reserved.

The terms also say Kuoni may offset these charges against the customer credit collected through the website. In plain terms, guest contributions are held as credit with Kuoni, and if the trip falls through, the fee can come out of that credit. Couples should factor that in before asking guests to contribute, and should ask Kuoni what happens to the remaining credit in that case, which the page does not say.

One more clause sets the limits of these terms. They apply only to the content and services reached through the hochzeitsreise.kuoni.ch domain, and the page expressly reserves different rules on the websites of other companies in the Kuoni group. The conditions of the trip itself, deposits, payment dates and the ordinary cancellation scale for flights and hotels, are therefore not on this page, and a couple should ask for them with the quote.

Language

The site has a language switch for German, French, Italian and English (DE, FR, IT and EN). That matters twice over: a couple can read about the service in English, and the guests invited to contribute may not all read German. The page does not say whether the personal wedding website itself can be set up in more than one language, or which languages the Kuoni specialists advise in; both are worth asking.

What the page leaves open

The honeymoon page publishes no destinations list, no prices, no minimum trip length and no booking lead time. It does not say how guests pay (by card or otherwise) beyond the one-click contribution, whether contributions can exceed the trip price, or how long the wedding website stays online. It does not say whether a honeymoon booked through a Kuoni branch found with the agency finder qualifies in the same way as one booked online, although the terms tie the website to booking directly with Kuoni.

The site does not deal with the wedding itself: it is a honeymoon and gift service, not a wedding planner.

Who it suits

The Kuoni honeymoon site suits couples who already lean toward a classic long-haul honeymoon and want their guests to contribute to it instead of buying gifts, particularly couples whose guests live in different countries and read different languages. It suits couples who like to see a sample of the guest page before deciding. It is less useful to couples who want to compare honeymoon prices on the page itself, since those sit on Kuoni's other pages, and couples should read the CHF 250 cancellation term carefully before collecting money from guests.