One of the biggest decisions to make when planning your Irish wedding is the location.
To make your job easier, made-to-order jewelers Austen & Blake have launched a campaign ranking all 32 counties in Ireland to discover which is the best location to exchange vows.
After looking at a variety of criteria, the researchers named Dublin the best county in Ireland to say "I Do."
Austen & Blake's in-house expert Anthony French said: “By creating this campaign, we hope to take a little bit of the pressure off of couples trying to make one of the biggest decisions about their wedding day. A lot goes into choosing where to tie the knot, which is why we included seven different criteria - those we consider some of the most important aspects of a dream wedding location.”
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Each county was ranked on the number of official wedding venues, local florists, local catering services, Instagram geotags, hotels, transport options and average temperature.
Dublin outranked every other county on almost all of the criteria, coming out on top in 6 out of 7 factors. Ireland's capital boasts 84 official wedding venues, 1493 hotels and seven different transport options. It also made the top of the list of "most photogenic."
Waterford beat Dublin as the county with the best average temperature. In fact, weather is the only criteria that Dublin fell short on. Although Dublin didn't even make the top five on average temperature, it did rank in the top five for the lowest chance of rain.
The top five counties with the highest average temperature are:
1. Waterford - 14°C
2. Cork - 13.92°C
3. Louth - 13.83°C
4. Limerick - 13.75°C
5. Clare - 13.67°C
The five counties with the lowest chance of rain:
1. Louth - 24.44%
2. Kilkenny - 32.03%
3. Waterford - 32.03%
4. Dublin - 34.23%
5. Meath - 34.23%
As for the most photogenic counties, Dublin claimed the top spot with 13,674,868 tagged images on Instagram - significantly more than every other county.
The top five most photogenic counties in Ireland are:
1. Dublin - 13,674,868
2. Galway - 1,996,657
3. Limerick - 739,392
4. Kilkenny - 503,452
5. Derry - 498,748
Cork, the second largest Irish city, came in second to Dublin for most of the criteria with 71 wedding venues, 10 florists, and four catering services. However, it did outrank the capital when it came to average temperature.
Meanwhile, Galway is the second most photogenic county and Kerry came in second on the number of hotels (1006). Antrim also made its way into the top five and ranked in the top five for both the number of official wedding venues and the number of hotels.
Here are the Irish counties that made it into the overall top five:
1. Dublin
2. Cork
3. Galway
4. Kerry
5. Antrim
“Looking at the results, it seems that the counties with the largest populations came out on top, with four out of the top five sitting in the top five for the highest populated Irish counties. What is interesting is that Antrim, currently the 16th most populated county in Ireland, made it into the top five over some of the other more populated counties - proving that bigger isn’t always better!” said French.
“Of course, choosing your wedding venue is a very personal decision and what might be important to one person might not sit as high on your priority list, so whilst our data shows that Dublin offers up the most options for a number of criteria, other counties might be better suited for other reasons. As long as you are surrounded by your favorite people, in the grand scheme of things, where you get married doesn’t really matter.”
To view the full study, visit the Austen & Blake blog.
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