The Destinations Nobody Expected: Dubai, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro After COVID

I have been paying attention to where destination wedding inquiries come from — not just the volume, but the geographic spread, the types of couples, and the reasons they give for choosing a location — since I began photographing internationally. The pandemic disrupted these patterns more thoroughly than anything I had previously observed, and the redistribution that followed was not entirely predictable.

The mainstream story of the post-pandemic destination wedding market is about the boom in established locations: Italy rebounded, Mexico surged, the Caribbean recovered. Couples embraced larger guest lists, reflecting confidence in global travel, and new regions emerged as favorites with heightened emphasis on luxury and personalization. All of that is true. But there is a less-discussed story about the places that benefited from the disruption in less obvious ways. Here are the three I have watched most closely.

Dubai: The Pandemic's Unexpected Wedding Capital

Dubai's position during the pandemic was unique: the city maintained a more open posture toward international arrivals than most comparable destinations, and the UAE's domestic market — affluent, internationally mobile, and accustomed to large-scale events — did not stop planning weddings the way European and North American markets did. What the pandemic did for Dubai as an international destination wedding location is harder to quantify but equally real: it demonstrated to a global audience that Dubai's infrastructure could handle events at scale when other cities could not.

The Dubai I am photographing in 2023 is a significantly more visible destination wedding market than the Dubai of 2019. This is partly the organic result of continued development — several extraordinary new properties have opened in the intervening years that have elevated the visual vocabulary available to destination wedding photography here. The desert interior specifically, which I find the most photographically compelling environment in the UAE, is now being used more actively in wedding portrait sessions by couples who have seen what it produces and specifically requested it.

The couples choosing Dubai in 2023 tend to be in one of two categories: South Asian diaspora families for whom the city is culturally familiar and logistically central; and multi-continental couples — one partner from North America, one from South Asia or the Middle East — for whom Dubai's position as a geographic midpoint for geographically dispersed families is a genuine practical consideration. Neither of these categories is new, but both are growing.

Buenos Aires: Europe in South America, Discovered

Buenos Aires had a complicated pandemic. Argentina's economic instability, which predates COVID by decades, was significantly worsened by the crisis, and the peso's continued depreciation created a situation that is genuinely complicated to navigate for international couples: the destination is extraordinarily affordable in dollar or euro terms, but the planning process requires careful management of currency exchange across a volatile period.

What the pandemic did to Buenos Aires as a destination is surface it for a category of couple who had not previously been considering South America for a wedding at all. The couples I am seeing inquire about Buenos Aires in 2022 and 2023 tend to be culturally sophisticated, often European or North American with Argentine heritage connections, and interested in something that photographs with European visual character while being genuinely located in the southern hemisphere. The comparison to Paris that Buenos Aires's Hausmannian boulevards invite is not unfair — and the Palermo parks in autumn (March through May in the southern hemisphere) produce images with a European autumnal quality that surprises people who expect tropics from South America.

The Buenos Aires destination wedding market is early-stage in a way that the mature European markets are not, which means the best locations are still available, the vendor pricing remains extremely competitive, and the photographs produced there have a freshness and specificity that comes from being genuinely discovered. I expect that to change. I am watching it change in real-time.

Rio de Janeiro: Presence, Complexity, Reward

Rio is the most complicated destination on this list to recommend unreservedly, and I want to be honest about that before I tell you why I think about it constantly as a photographic location. The security situation requires careful planning and local knowledge. Event logistics are more complex than in comparable South American destinations. The gaps between the extraordinary and the difficult are narrower in Rio than anywhere else I work.

With that stated clearly: the geography of Rio de Janeiro may be the most dramatically beautiful of any city in the world, and photographically it offers a range of environments — ocean beach, mountain summit, colonial hilltop neighbourhood, rainforest interior, reflecting bay — that is simply not replicated anywhere else. Christ the Redeemer at dawn, before the first tourist groups arrive, is one of the most extraordinary portrait contexts available to destination wedding photography. The Santa Teresa neighbourhood, with its Belle Époque mansions descending to the Lapa viaduct, photographs with a moody, cinematic quality that I cannot find duplicated elsewhere in South America.

The couples who are choosing Rio for destination weddings in 2022 and 2023 are, without exception, doing so with clear eyes and specific intention. They have researched the complexity, they have planned around it, and they want what Rio specifically offers. The result is a category of client who is more prepared, more intentional, and more collaborative than the average destination wedding couple — and those qualities produce better photographs.

The Common Thread

What Dubai, Buenos Aires, and Rio share is that they are destinations that reward intentional choice over default choice. None of them is anyone's easy answer. All of them require more research, more planning, and more active engagement with what the destination specifically offers than booking a Cancún resort or a Tuscany villa. Post-pandemic, couples feel less pressured to have larger guest count weddings and are more prone to planning celebrations they want versus ones that are standard and common. That shift in attitude — toward intention, toward specificity, toward choosing what is actually right rather than what is conventionally expected — is exactly what these three cities require and reward.

The pandemic clarified what couples actually want from a destination. The destinations that benefit most are the ones that offer something genuine and specific rather than something generic and safe. Dubai, Buenos Aires, and Rio are all, in their very different ways, genuine and specific. That is why I am watching them, and why I think the shift toward them that began during the pandemic period will not fully reverse.