Trying to book vacation package for Honeymoon, please help!
 

First time poster, so please forgive me if I've posted this in the wrong forum. And sorry about the length, but this isn't easy to explain...

I'm trying to book a honeymoon, and I'm running into an issue with booking vacation packages on Expedia (and other booking sites). Here's the problem:

We live in St. Louis, the wedding is in Charleston, SC, where her parents live. We want to book flight and hotel together from Charleston, SC, to Puerto Vallarta, stay at Grand Velas Riviera Nayarit, and then fly back to STL. For our dates, the package with hotel and flight is about $2000 less than booking the hotel by itself (which seems crazy). Expedia is telling me I can only book vacation packages when it's round trip to and from one city.

The ideas I've come up with so far to get around this are:
(1) book RT from Charleston, never get on the return flight to Charleston, and book a separate flight home to STL;

(2) book RT from a place that's cheap to fly to PV, such as Mexico City, never use the flights at all -- only the hotel -- and then book our flights entirely separately.
Believe it or not, #2 is actually cheaper than #1, but I'm a bit worried they might cancel our package if we miss the first flight? Normally I wouldn't be so concerned, but it would be terrible for that to happen on our honeymoon.

Ideas I've eliminated:

(A) doing the opposite of #1 and booking RT from STL and only using the flight home (about the same price as #1, but then have the concern about them cancelling the package when I miss the first flight)

(B) flying RT out of a hub city, such as Atlanta or Dallas, that we could cross both going and coming (because of the problems that would create with our checked baggage).

I have a travel agent looking into this for me, but it didn't sound promising. Can any of you seasoned travel vets think of something I'm missing here? Thank you very much for any help you can give us.

Trying to book vacation package for Honeymoon, please help!
 

I think option 1 sounds safe. Not much they can do to you for missing your return flight. Just don't book the real return with the same airline so they don't cancel it as a duplicate. If you must book same airline then leave your frequent flyer info off of the reservation until you get to the airport as that's often how they find duplicate reservations.

Trying to book vacation package for Honeymoon, please help!
 

Why not book round trip from St. Louis, with a one way Charleston - St. Louis, even if it's the night before?

+1 -> this was my first thought as I read the OP. It's a R/T to Charleston, and then an R/T to PVR.

And it might even have the side benefit of allowing you to swing by home and repack for the honeymoon.

The benefit to the OP's #1 is minimal time in the air, especially if they have family to help deal with luggage needed for the wedding but not the PVR trip. So I can see benefit there as well.

Don't know about option #2...seems *logical* that no-showing the air wouldn't effect the hotel, as package deals are run through a travel agent with a prepaid hotel unrelated to the airline. What I don't get is *why* this think is $2,000 cheaper....hell, I did a 5-night PVR trip with the whole family one time and I don't think the whole thing everything included cost two grand. Since packages aren't my area of expertise, I'd probably stick with #1 knowing that the throwaway ticket on the return can't affect the hotel.

Although I didn't include this as an idea I had ruled out, I did think about this option. I ruled it out because of what the other poster mentioned about limiting our time in the air. There are hardly any direct flights out of Charleston, so on our way down to PVR, we'd have to do something like CHS-->ORD-->STL-->DFW-->PVR, which didn't sound too fun 2 days after the wedding.

Thanks for everyone's feedback, especially the point about keeping FF #'s off of duplicate reservations to prevent them from being cancelled. I wouldn't have thought of that.

I will keep checking back to see if anyone else has a solution or other thoughts, but I'm kind of giving in to the fact that I'll have to do option 1. Thanks again.