Smoky Mountain Elopement & Micro Wedding Packages Near Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge
Maybe you know you want to get married in the Smoky Mountains. Maybe you know you want something smaller, easier, and a whole lot less stressful than planning a traditional 150-person wedding.
But exactly how small are we talking?
Do you basically want to show up, say “I do,” sign the marriage license, and head off to celebrate?
Do you want a simple little wedding at the chapel with a handful of your favorite people?
Do you want the full wedding experience—decor, getting-ready photos, family photos, cake, first dances, and plenty of time to explore the property?
Or do you want to do all of that and sneak away into the mountains for an adventure afterward?
That’s exactly why we offer several different wedding experiences at Chapel in the Hollow.
Our Smoky Mountain wedding packages range from a super-simple 15-minute legal ceremony for two to a full Adventure Wedding experience with up to 35 guests, professional photography, cake, champagne, and a trip to the Foothills Parkway for mountain photos.
The trick is figuring out which one sounds most like you.
So, rather than making you compare a bunch of separate pages while muttering, “Wait… what was included in that one again?” we’ve put everything together here.
Let’s find your wedding.
Click here to go straight to pricing.
At a Glance: Our Four Smoky Mountain Wedding Options
| Make It Legal | Petite Wedding | Signature Wedding | Adventure Wedding | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time | 15 minutes | 30 minutes | 1–3 hours | Extended experience |
| Guests | Couple only | Up to 10 | Up to 35 | Up to 10 or 11–35 |
| Grace Period | No | No | 30 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Officiant | Included | Included | Optional | Included |
| Photography | Optional | Optional | Optional | Included |
| Event Management | No | No | Optional | Included |
| Videography | No | No | Optional | Optional upgrade |
| Chapel Decor | Chapel upgrade available | Cream + white only | Choose included options | Choose included options |
| Outside Vendors | No | No | Yes, with required insurance | Package services provided in-house |
| Additional Decor Packages | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple Photo Locations | No | Chapel/selected package area only | Yes | Yes + Foothills Parkway |
| Mountain Adventure | No | No | Mountain-view field available with photography | Foothills Parkway included |
Now let’s get into what those differences actually mean.
Make It Legal Wedding: When You Just Want to Get Married
Best for: couples who want a private, affordable Tennessee wedding ceremony without all the traditional wedding-day extras.
Our Make It Legal Wedding is exactly what the name suggests.
You want to get married.
We want to help you get married.
Nobody needs a seating chart.
This is our simplest and quickest option and works beautifully for couples searching for a courthouse wedding alternative near Gatlinburg, a simple Smoky Mountain elopement, or a private legal ceremony while visiting East Tennessee.
Your Make It Legal experience includes 15 minutes on the property and an officiant to perform your legal marriage ceremony. You bring your valid Tennessee marriage license, we provide the person who makes the magic official, and voilà—you leave married.
We offer Make It Legal ceremonies in our Highland area, with an option to upgrade to use the chapel area instead. Pricing varies depending on which location you choose.
Professional photography can also be added for an additional fee, but it takes place during the same 15-minute window.
What You Won’t Have With a Make It Legal Wedding
This isn’t a tiny version of one of our larger weddings. It’s intentionally a completely different experience.
There is no 30-minute grace period, which means there isn’t time before the ceremony to get dressed or decorate.
Come wedding-ready.
There are also:
- No guests
- No outside vendors
- No outside photographers or officiants
- No use of our wedding accessories
- No decorating time
- No bridal suite/getting-ready time
- No extended family photos
- No reception activities
- No roaming around the property for an extended photo session
And that’s exactly why some couples love it.
You don’t want all of that.
Maybe you’re planning a bigger celebration later. Maybe you’re vacationing in Gatlinburg and decided Tennessee seems like a pretty fantastic place to get married. Maybe the thought of planning a wedding makes you want to crawl under a blanket and never come out.
Or maybe you’ve been together forever and you’re thinking, “Can somebody please just marry us already?”
We can do that.
Choose Make It Legal If…
You want the easiest, quickest option possible, it’s just the two of you, and your biggest priority is leaving legally married (or non-legally committed).
Petite Wedding: A Tiny Wedding With Just Enough Wedding Magic
Best for: couples who want a simple Smoky Mountain wedding ceremony with up to 10 guests without planning a full micro wedding.
Sometimes 15 minutes isn’t quite enough—but an hour or two feels like more wedding than you need.
Enter the Petite Wedding.
This option bridges the gap between our Make It Legal ceremony and our full Signature Weddings.
You’ll have 30 minutes at the chapel and can invite up to 10 guests to celebrate with you.
Your officiant is included, and the chapel will be styled simply and beautifully with our cream fabric and white florals.
It’s essentially a ready-to-go little Smoky Mountain wedding.
You bring yourselves, your marriage license, your favorite people, and whatever you’re wearing.
We’ll handle the ceremony space.
Can We Add Photography?
Yes!
Professional photography can be included for an additional fee, with photographs taken around the chapel area during your reserved time.
Because this experience is only 30 minutes, we aren’t trying to squeeze an entire wedding-day photography marathon into it.
There won’t be time to visit every photo location on the property or travel to the mountain-view field.
Instead, this experience focuses on the chapel and the beautiful forest immediately surrounding it.
What Isn’t Included?
Like Make It Legal, the Petite Wedding does not include our normal 30-minute grace period.
Everyone should arrive wedding-ready.
It also doesn’t include access to our full collection of accessories or decor options. The chapel setup is intentionally streamlined with cream fabric and white florals.
You also cannot bring outside wedding vendors with this package.
Why so many rules?
Because keeping the Petite Wedding simple is what allows us to offer a genuine little wedding experience within such a short window.
Once we start adding custom decorating, multiple vendors, getting-ready time, elaborate photography requests, cake cutting, first dances, and Aunt Linda’s twelve boxes of Pinterest projects, we’ve officially left Petite Wedding territory.
That’s when you’ll want our Signature Wedding.
Choose a Petite Wedding If…
You want an intimate ceremony with a few people you love, don’t need much customization, and want something a little more substantial than simply making it legal.
Signature Wedding: The Full Chapel in the Hollow Experience
Best for: elopements and micro weddings that want flexibility, customization, more photography, guests, traditional wedding moments, or their own wedding professionals.
This is what most couples traditionally think of when they picture a wedding at Chapel in the Hollow.
Our Signature Weddings are completely customizable, time-based experiences available in 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, and 3-hour options.
And this is where you get to start playing.
Want a first look?
Absolutely.
Want Dad to walk you down the aisle?
Do it.
Want your kids involved in the ceremony?
We love it.
Cake cutting? First dance? Toast? Handfasting? Personal vows? Family photos? A dramatic black wedding dress? Metallica down the aisle?
This is your wedding.
You have room to make it feel like one.
Your 30-Minute Grace Period
One major difference between Signature Weddings and our shorter options is that Signature Weddings include access to the property up to 30 minutes before your booked wedding time.
That grace period can be used for things like getting dressed, putting out personal decor, and preparing for the ceremony.
The chapel will already be decorated with the included selections you’ve chosen before you arrive.
That means you aren’t spending the beginning of your wedding hanging fabric from rafters while wearing Spanx.
You’re welcome.
Choose Your Chapel Style
Signature Weddings include access to our collection of fabrics, florals, and other included accessories.
You can choose combinations that fit your wedding style rather than being limited to one preset design.
Depending on your vision, you can also add some of our optional accessory packages for even more personality.
Go romantic.
Go boho.
Go colorful.
Go moody.
Go seasonal.
Make the chapel feel like your chapel for the day.
Build the Services You Actually Want
One of our favorite things about our Signature Wedding structure is that we don’t force everyone into exactly the same all-inclusive package.
You can choose the services that make sense for you, including:
- Officiating
- Photography
- Videography
- Event management
Want all four? Fabulous.
Only need the venue and photographer? Also fabulous.
Already have wedding professionals you love? You may bring your own.
Outside wedding professionals are required to provide the appropriate certificate of insurance, with the exception of your officiant.
That gives you much more flexibility than our Make It Legal and Petite Wedding experiences.
Up to 35 Guests
Signature Weddings can accommodate up to 35 guests for the ceremony, making this our primary option for couples planning a Smoky Mountain micro wedding with family and friends.
You can still use it for an elopement with just the two of you, though!
You don’t have to fill the seats.
In fact, plenty of couples choose a longer package with no guests because photography is important to them and they want time to explore.
Explore the Property for Photos
Your available time can be used to explore our different on-property photo locations.
Depending on your timeline and preferences, that might mean photos around the chapel, mossy tree, creek, vines, rock garden, forest areas, or other seasonal locations.
Couples can also choose our field with the mountain view.
The field is reserved for couple portraits and requires approximately a 30-minute block to allow time to drive there, take photos, and return.
That’s an important consideration when deciding how many hours to book.
A one-hour wedding can be wonderful—but unfortunately we haven’t figured out how to make sixty minutes contain 120 minutes yet.
The more experiences and photo locations you want, the more time you’ll need.
Choose a Signature Wedding If…
You want the freedom to create your own version of a Smoky Mountain elopement or micro wedding rather than choosing a predetermined experience.
Adventure Wedding: Chapel Romance Meets Smoky Mountain Adventure
Best for: couples who want the convenience of a wedding package AND an epic mountain photography experience.
And then we have the big one.
Our Adventure Wedding combines an intimate ceremony at Chapel in the Hollow with a curated wedding experience and a photography adventure to the Foothills Parkway.
In other words:
Get married in the forest.
Celebrate with the people you love.
Then ditch everybody and run away to the mountains with us.
Seems reasonable.
Two Adventure Wedding Options
Adventure Weddings are available for:
Up to 10 guests
or
11–35 guests
That means you don’t have to choose between having your family at your wedding and getting those adventurous Smoky Mountain elopement photos you’ve been saving on Pinterest.
You can have both.
What Does an Adventure Wedding Include?
Adventure Weddings bundle many of the services couples commonly add individually into one experience.
Your package includes:
- A 30-minute grace period
- Use of the chapel for your ceremony
- Use of our included chapel accessories
- Officiating
- Professional photography
- Event management
- Chapel, family, and couple portraits
- A small wedding cake
- Use of our cake accessories
- A bottle of champagne for couples age 21+
- Champagne flutes
- An 11×14 wedding canvas
- Transportation for the couple to and from the Foothills Parkway
- Couple portraits in the mountains
Once we’re finished with the chapel portion of the wedding, we drive the two of you to the Foothills Parkway and back.
No worrying about navigating mountain roads in separate cars.
No trying to coordinate a convoy.
And, no, your 27 guests aren’t coming with us.
The adventure portion is couple only, giving you a chance to breathe, soak in the fact that you JUST GOT MARRIED, and get gorgeous portraits together against the Smoky Mountains.
Want Even More?
Adventure Weddings can also be upgraded with additional services and experiences, including options such as:
- Videography
- Hair and makeup at your location
- Optional chapel accessory packages
It’s designed for couples who want more than a ceremony but don’t necessarily want to spend their wedding day coordinating twenty different moving pieces.
We’ve already bundled the pieces together.
You just have to come get married.
Choose an Adventure Wedding If…
Wedding photography is one of your biggest priorities, you want true mountain portraits in addition to the forest chapel, and you like the idea of having the major pieces of your wedding experience bundled together.
Which Smoky Mountain Wedding Package Should We Choose?
Still debating?
Here’s the easiest way to think about it.
“We literally just want to get married.”
→ Make It Legal
“We want a real little ceremony with our closest people, but we don’t need all the extras.”
→ Petite Wedding
“We want to customize our wedding, choose our services, take lots of photos, and have the full Chapel in the Hollow experience.”
→ Signature Wedding
“We want the wedding experience AND we absolutely want epic Smoky Mountain photos.”
→ Adventure Wedding
And if you’re caught between two options, think less about what a wedding is supposed to include and more about what you actually want to remember.
Elopement, Micro Wedding, or Adventure: There Isn’t a Wrong Way to Get Married
One of the reasons Chapel in the Hollow exists is because we don’t believe every couple needs the same wedding.
Some people have dreamed about their wedding since they were six.
Some people would rather wrestle a bear than spend a year planning centerpieces.
Some want their parents and siblings beside them.
Some want to disappear into Tennessee, get married in secret, and casually drop the news in the family group chat afterward.
We have room for all of those people.
Our different Smoky Mountain elopement and micro wedding packages are designed to give you options without forcing you to pay for things you don’t need—or skip the experiences that actually matter to you.
Whether you’re searching for an affordable Gatlinburg elopement package, a simple Tennessee wedding for two, a micro wedding venue near Pigeon Forge, or a full Smoky Mountain adventure wedding, the goal is the same:
Choose the experience that feels like you.
Then come to the woods and get married.
We’ll take it from there.
Ready to Find Your Wedding?
Start by checking our Calendar of Availability to see whether your date is open.
From there, explore current Pricing & Packages, take a look through our Real Weddings, or head to our Book Now page when you’ve found the experience that fits.
Still not sure which option is right for you? Reach out and tell us what you’re envisioning—your guest count, the things that matter most to you, and how much of a wedding day you actually want.
We’ll help point you in the right direction.
Because choosing your person was the important part.
Choosing your wedding package should be considerably easier.