Where I work, and what the travel costs

Rui Charnock works anywhere in Portugal, from a studio in Lisbon. Travel is included within X km, which covers Lisbon, Sintra, Cascais, Setúbal and Comporta. Beyond that it is charged at cost and quoted before you book. Anything over about three hours each way — the Algarve, the Douro, Porto — is an overnight trip.

Everything on this page is a number you can plan against. If your venue is not on it, the drive is the only thing that changes; the day's work is the same wherever it happens.

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Travel bands from the Lisbon studio

Distances are by road from central Lisbon. Drive times are without traffic; I add an hour to every one of them when I plan the day.
Where	By road from Lisbon	Travel charge	Overnight	Minimum booked
Lisbon	4 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Sintra	24 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Colares	24 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Cascais and Estoril	27 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Ericeira	32 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Sesimbra	39 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Azeitão	47 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Serra da Arrábida	47 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Óbidos	86 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Alcácer do Sal	96 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Comporta	98 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
Melides	98 km	Included within X km	No	4 hours
The Alentejo	149 km	At cost, quoted before you book	No	6 hours
Évora	149 km	At cost, quoted before you book	No	6 hours
Estremoz	172 km	At cost, quoted before you book	No	6 hours
Vila Nova de Milfontes	177 km	At cost, quoted before you book	No	6 hours
Monsaraz	197 km	At cost, quoted before you book	No	6 hours
Silves	234 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Lagos	237 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Sagres	244 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
The Algarve	255 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Almancil and Quinta do Lago	255 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Vilamoura	255 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Tavira	274 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Porto	348 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Lamego	362 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
The Douro Valley	380 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Peso da Régua	380 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Amarante	381 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Guimarães	398 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Ponte de Lima	432 km	At cost, plus one night	Yes	6 hours
Funchal, Madeira	1053 km, by air	Flights and accommodation at cost	Yes	6 hours
the Azores	1447 km, by air	Flights and accommodation at cost	Yes	6 hours

What the four bands mean

Included — up to about an hour and three quarters

Lisbon, Sintra, Cascais and Estoril, Setúbal, Azeitão, Sesimbra, Óbidos, Alcácer do Sal and Comporta all sit inside this band. There is no travel line on the quote and no accommodation line.

It also means I can come and look at the venue before the day without it costing you anything, which is worth more than it sounds. Knowing where the six o'clock light lands decides where I stand for the ceremony.

Day trip — roughly two to three hours

Évora, Estremoz, Monsaraz, Óbidos's hinterland and the northern Alentejo. Travel beyond the included radius is charged at cost and quoted before you book, never after.

A day trip caps what I can cover at the start of the morning. If you want getting-ready drawn at a venue two and a half hours away, it is cheaper to buy the night before than to buy the extra hours.

Overnight — three hours and beyond

The whole Algarve, Porto, the Douro Valley, the Minho. I come the night before so I am on site rested and early rather than arriving mid-morning having driven since six.

Accommodation goes on the quote at cost as a line you can see. The Douro is the one case where it is two nights rather than one, because 380 km each way in a day at the end of a nine-hour booking is not a serious plan.

By air — Madeira and the Azores

Both are reachable and both have been asked about. Flights and accommodation are quoted separately and at cost, and the sensible shape is a longer booking rather than a short one, because the fixed cost of getting there does not care how many hours you book.

There are no island pages on this site. There is no work to show from either yet, and a page claiming otherwise would be the sort of page this site was just cleared of.

The 278 mainland municipalities, and the seven places couples name

Every dot is the centre of one mainland Portuguese municipality. The named marks are the regions couples and planners actually use as words. Drawn from the same coordinates the travel table is calculated from.

The seven regions, and how they differ

These are the places with enough of a wedding scene that the drawing problem is genuinely different in each. Every one of them has its own page, and none of them repeats another.

Minimum booked hours, and why they go up with distance

Four hours is the shortest booking anywhere. Inside the included radius that is the whole rule.

Past the two-hour mark the minimum is six hours, and past three it is six with the night before. This is not a surcharge dressed up as a policy — it is that a nine-hour round trip for a four-hour booking prices the drawing at less than the driving, and I would rather say so than quietly load the day rate.

If your day genuinely only needs four hours and you are four hours away, say so. Sometimes there is another wedding in the same region that weekend and the travel splits.

For planners putting a shortlist together

Prices are on the pricing page in full, with no form in front of them, so a client can be sent a link rather than a promise to find out.

Availability is answered within 24 hours, and a date can be held for seven days while a couple decides.

Coverage is the whole country. The bands above are the only thing that changes between a Sintra wedding and a Douro one.

Everything else a planner asks for, on one page

Check your date

Tell me when and where. If I am free, I will come back with what it costs and roughly how the day would run — usually the same evening.

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I reply within 24 hours.