TWA Hotel at JFK Airport Wedding

Tara and Nick knew the only place for them to get married was the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. Nick is a pilot and Tara is a flight attendant, so they loved incorporating their industry into their wedding. The TWA fit their Mad Men style wedding perfectly. They also wanted a guest friendly wedding so all their guests could stay there, party, and not worry about traveling between locations.

From the bride:

Well first and foremost, we are airline crew! Nick is a Pilot and I (Tara) am a Flight Attendant, both for major US airlines based out of New York City. We are both in our 30s, and we’ve been to so many weddings and we really just wanted this to be one big party that was easy on everyone.

So to achieve this, we wanted it ALL to take place at a Hotel. We could have the Rehearsal Dinner, Welcome Drinks, Getting ready, Pictures, Ceremony, Reception AND After Party all in the same place. It really is SO easy on everyone, and because you don’t have transportation to worry about, you have time for more pictures!

We looked around at a lot of hotels, but none had the wow factor we were looking for. We stayed at The TWA Hotel for Nick’s birthday when the hotel first opened in 2019, and when we heard that they did weddings, we couldn’t sign our contract fast enough.

Mad Men and Catch Me if You Can are two of our most favorite things to watch. Mid Century Modern is our favorite design aesthetic. And we fly for a living! It really couldn’t have been more perfect. I kept telling people our colors are all the colors and none of the colors. Obviously, Red is the most overwhelming colors at the Hotel so it’s tough to do anything that doesn’t go with that color.

I also wanted my Bridesmaids to be comfortable in their dress, so I had them pick any black velvet dress that they wanted to wear, and then my Man of Honor wore an all black velvet suit. For the flowers, I was inspired by the Retro TWA advertisements from the 60s, and wanted to pull all of those bold colors from those ads as inspiration.

We made Welcome Bags for everyone who was staying at the hotel and  bought our favorite airline snacks, Biscoff Cookies and Stroopwaffles, to place inside them! We also made a “newspaper” that welcomed our guests, and gave everyone the timeline and a map of where everything would be taking place in the hotel.

We had our favorite local band, New Power Soul, play at our reception. We first saw them at a bar in Montclair, NJ called Just Jakes years ago, and I said to Nick that night, “If we ever get married, we’re hiring them to play at our wedding”. They were the best decision we made, and people keep raving to us how fun our band was.

We rented out “The Connie” airplane for our after party and it was the most fun part of the night! Everyone had so much fun inside of the airplane eating Pizza from a local New York City Pizzeria and it was the perfect way to end the night.