The Most Expensive Royal Wedding Celebrations

A royal wedding is a marriage ceremony involving members of a royal family. Weddings involving senior members of the royal family are often seen as important occasions of state and attract significant national and international attention.

When it comes to getting married, the rich are really no different than you or me: They want to have weddings to remember. Their financial firepower just gives them more ways to pump up the drama than the average U.S. bride and groom with a $24,000 budget.

Rather than a simple spray of white roses, Donald Trump wed Melania Knauss amid 10,000 roses, peonies and hydrangeas. Where the more common man might have had Uncle Tony’s son’s garage band play at the reception, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise had Andrea Bocelli.

When Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, married Princess Salama in 1981, his proud parents built a 20,000-seat stadium for the week-long celebration, the most expensive wedding on record at $100 million in today’s dollars. The sheikh visited every town in the emirate by horseback during that week, and fed them all. During the ceremony, wedding gifts for his bride were delivered by 20 bejeweled camels.