Reserve gorgeous venues for your luxury elopement with our editor's recommendations for elopement-friendly ceremony sites, plus three tiers of options for California honeymoon venues.
About LuxElope
LuxElope.com is a comprehensive website that seeks to assist couples with creating an amazing alternative to a traditional wedding in the form of a luxury elopement. In addition to travel and legal information on some of the most elopement-friendly destinations in the world, LuxElope demonstrates through cost comparisons and budget breakdowns how shifting the focus of wedding spending to the couple's experience (instead of that of guests) can transform even moderate funds into a once-in-a-lifetime event that is free of extreme planning, compromises, or familial complications.
MARILYN OLIVEIRA Co-Founder & Editor in Chief
As the Editor in Chief of LuxElope.com, Marilyn Oliveira combines her extensive editorial and writing experience with a vast knowledge of weddings and entertaining to strategize and create useful, compelling content aimed at assisting couples with planning an exquisite luxury elopement.
Marilyn began her career in the wedding industry as the senior editor and editorial manager of WeddingChannel.com, where she produced and managed all content across the site and represented the company extensively in the media. From there, she transitioned into the position of Executive Editor for the luxury magazine Inside Weddings, a quarterly print publication distributed throughout the United States and in select international markets. Her hands-on development of content spanned topics including real weddings, invitations and stationery, wedding trends, gifts, bridal fashion, jewelry, and honeymoons, and she continues to contribute to the popular publication as a guest writer.
Prior to launching LuxElope, Marilyn strategized and implemented the editorial vision and direction for Evite Gatherings, the popular content division of Evite.com, including producing the company's photo shoots and managing the development and publication of editorial and sponsored content across the Evite brands.
Marilyn has appeared on local and national media outlets, including "Entertainment Tonight," "E! Entertainment News," "The Insider," "Inside Edition," and "Fox & Friends." Her expertise has been tapped for and quoted in TIME Magazine, USA Today, Forbes, The New York Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Martha Stewart Weddings, and Brides among others, and her syndicated wedding column for McClatchy-Tribune was distributed and published in more than 300 newspapers in the United States and Europe. She is a graduate of UCLA and resides in the California Bay Area. You can follow Marilyn on Twitter @luxeditor.
ANITA CHU Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Throughout an accomplished career that spans more than a decade in digital product management, Anita Chu has demonstrated remarkable success in attracting and engaging new online audiences through improved user experience and new product offerings for a variety of websites and start-ups.
Anita contributed to the enormous success of the patented online registry search for WeddingChannel.com (a site that at the time boasted 3MM unique visitors and 70MM pageviews per month), working closely with retailers including Federated Department Stores, Tiffany & Co., Barney's New York, and others to make the wedding-registry process faster and easier for millions of couples and gift buyers. At Gifts.com, Anita created a more personalized, user-friendly gift-buying experience for hundreds of thousands of consumers by working on an interactive "Personality Gift Finder" tool and a birthday-reminder service that has inspired similar products adopted by dozens of major online retailers. Her content initiatives have increased brand awareness and doubled year-over-year page visits for a range of online enterprises, and the unique site features and social apps she's developed for e-commerce and entertainment properties have garnered viral reach and growth.
Anita's experience with the intricacies of wedding planning from both a professional and personal perspective led her to embrace and co-develop the LuxElope concept and website, where the goal is to simplify the planning process and focus on the couple instead of hundreds of guests. She currently resides in Phoenix, AZ and is a proud UCLA graduate (Go Bruins!) and avid L.A. sports fan.
