London to Marrakech is about three hours forty, direct. London to Delhi is around eight and a half. If half your guest list is in the UK and Europe, choosing Marrakech over an Indian venue removes roughly five hours from each of their journeys, twice.
The numbers
London to Marrakech, three hours forty, direct, several daily.
Dubai to Marrakech, about seven and a half hours, direct on some days and one stop on others.
Mumbai and Delhi to Marrakech, one stop, eleven to sixteen hours in total depending on connection.
For comparison: London to Udaipur is a connection and a domestic leg, typically twelve to fifteen hours door to door.
Why it decides things
Elderly guests. A four hour flight is a day trip. A fifteen hour journey with a connection is something a lot of grandparents will decline, and the guest list you imagined is not the one that comes.
Attendance. Shorter journeys mean higher acceptance, particularly from guests who have to take leave. Families consistently see better turnout from their European side when the wedding is in Morocco rather than India.
Cost to the guest. A shorter flight is a cheaper flight, and for a wedding where three hundred people are paying their own airfare, that is a courtesy that shows up in the RSVP rate.
Door to door is the number that matters
Flight time is what an airline sells. What a guest experiences is the whole journey: the drive to the airport, three hours before departure because they are travelling as a family with luggage, the flight, immigration, and the road at the other end.
The working rule is to add about three hours to any flight time for a direct routing, and about six for a connection, because a connection adds not only the layover but the second security queue, the second boarding and the risk that turns a four hour buffer into an overnight.
Applied to a guest list, a three hour forty flight is a day trip. A twelve hour connection is two days of somebody's annual leave, one at each end.
What an hour costs you on the RSVP
Nobody declines a wedding because of a flight time. They decline because of what the flight time implies: another two days off work, another two nights of hotel, childcare, and an elderly parent who cannot do a connection.
That is why this page exists. The hours themselves are not the argument. The argument is that a shorter flight quietly removes four or five separate reasons to say no, and for a wedding where three hundred people are paying their own airfare, that shows up in how many of them come.