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The Indian wedding makes you dream.
For Krishma Sood Bhojwani, this meant a four-day birthday party at the JW Marriott in Phuket, Thailand. The bride imported cheese wheels from Italy, sourced Iberian ham directly from Spain and hired a team of photographers from Mumbai. It flew in India and Japanese chefs and chefs prepare new food at 24 food stations.
The wedding consisted of 8 occasions spread over 4 days, all against the backdrop of the beachfront hotel where the lush jungle meets the coast of the province. The 120 guests, who flew from all over the world and wore finely embroidered etiquette suits and lehengas, were invited to cocktail dinners near the beach and nights in the ballroom.
Bhojwani had arranged a floating altar and wore classic outfits made by luxury designers like Sathroughasachi, whose creations can cost $30,000 each.
As for the cost? About $400,000 just for wedding occasions, Bhojwani estimates, and that doesn’t take into account the couple’s jewelry and outfits.
“I had a strict budget: cash doesn’t grow on a tree. We were rigorous with pricing and didn’t spend a dollar compared to what I said we would do,” Bhojwani, who is from Australia, told Insider.
In India, the wedding industry is worth $50 billion, and it’s not unusual for wealthy families to spend astronomical amounts of cash on weddings. In 2018, billionaire tycoon Mukesh Ambani spent $100 million on his daughter’s wedding, with visitors including Beyonce, Shah Rukh Khan and Hillary Clinton.
But even for the wealthy, weddings can be very expensive: Indian families have been known to spend up to $800,000 on destination weddings at five-star hotels and resorts across Southeast Asia. Traditionally, the bride’s circle of relatives paid the wedding prices, but this is now considered a replaced practice: many families, including Bhojwani and her husband, decide to divide the expenses into a percentage. As Bhojwani said, Indian couples get “great support from parents” to fund the costs of their marriage.
Now, as luxury resorts in Southeast Asia emerge from the pandemic, many of them are vying for those lucrative Indian weddings. Many of those institutions are still suffering the monetary effects of the pandemic and spare no effort to attract the businesses of wealthy Indian couples to fill in the gaps. After all, this wonderful Indian wedding is perhaps only the decisive thing between the end of the year in red or black.
One of the reasons high-end Indian weddings can be so valuable is that they are not one-day occasions: Sikh wedding ceremonies, for example, take place over several days, said Vin Ramash, a Singapore-based wedding planner. Company of Alangkaar.
“In high-end Punjabi weddings, they start with $100,000 per day, so it’s imaginable to spend $500,000,” Ramash told Insider, explaining that this is typical of weddings held at high-end hotels like Capella, St. Regis or Ritz. -Carlton.
But the bells, whistles and whims of the couple also contribute to the maximum price.
Handmade altars or mandaps and custom-designed decorations can cost about $40,000, Ramash said, and other requests like fireworks can charge even more.
And then there’s the element.
Since destination weddings are more popular among wealthy Indian couples, many couples are turning to Thailand. Ramash said Alangkaar’s tourism spouse in the country is planning between 400 and 500 “big-selling Indian weddings” in 2023 alone.
“Couples love destination weddings in Thailand for the price they get for every dollar spent. People need to delight, it’s not just a matter of status,” added Ramash, who organizes weddings in Singapore, Bali and Phuket.
Bhojwani and her husband had originally planned to hold their wedding at the Intercontinental Hotel in Phu Quoc, Vietnam. After lockdowns, restrictions and four postponements, they finally decided to hold their wedding in Thailand.
Phu Quoc vendors and organizers didn’t perceive what they were looking for for their wedding “no matter how much we negotiated,” Bhojwani said. Meanwhile, planners and the location in Thailand “understood the vision, scale, grandeur and experience” that she and her husband were for.
Given the repressed call and in an effort to return to pre-pandemic activity levels, tourism forums and luxury hotels are prioritizing marketing campaigns targeting the ultra-luxury Indian wedding segment. This means that destinations like Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Maldives compete for the same big-budget weddings.
The resorts do not forget any effort for the chosen destination. Hotels respond to all kinds of wedding requests, in addition to making special arrangements for devout rituals, such as offering a Hindu priest to celebrate the wedding. In some cases, visitors have even been introduced to Reebook at the spouses’ venues if a larger wedding party needs ebook the entire property.
Tourist offices are getting into it.
For Thailand, wedding earnings are included in the year’s tourism earnings. a senior tourism official. Indian tourists are the “priority” this year, Tanes Petsuwan, deputy governor of Thailand’s tourism authority, told Nikkei Asia.
Other tourist offices, such as the one in Indonesia, are also looking to woo those bright-eyed couples. These exclusive weddings can cost between $200,000 and $500,000, Sanjay Sondhi, CEO of Om Tourism and director of the Indonesian Tourism Board for India, told Insider.
Officials from the Indonesian tourism board collaborate with the largest wedding planners in countries like India, and in some cases even toast when resorts offer grooms.
The culmination of these paintings can be sweet. For a planned high-profile wedding on the tropical island of Bali, talks now revolve around a charter flight for about 250 guests, Sondhi said. The couple were thinking about the past at a destination wedding in Thailand.
With india’s premier wedding season, which runs from October to December, just around the corner, hotels are experiencing a resurgence of consultations.
Demand for Six Senses homes across Southeast Asia for weddings in India has increased, with Six Senses Uluwatu in Bali being the absolute “favorite,” Agnes Poon, Six Senses’ director of sales and marketing in Asia, told Insider. The five-star hotel hosted the wedding of an exclusive circle of relatives founded in south India, Poon said. And at the end of 2021, the hotel chain hosted the wedding of Bollywood stars Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal. The wedding took place at the chain’s flagship. active in India, Six Senses Fort Barwara.
Poon said requests are pouring in for a minimum of two hundred to 250 rooms at the resort, which sits on the famous limestone cliffs of Uluwatu and opens up to surprising Indian Ocean prospects.
It’s certainly not just Indian weddings that are a big deal. The global wedding industry generated $160. 5 billion in profits in 2020 and is expected to generate $414. 2 billion in profits in 2030, according to a report by Allied Market Research.
The luxury hotel Capella Singapore hosts weddings each and every weekend of the year, Victoria Lim, content marketer at Capella Hotel Group, told Insider. a construction in small, intimate celebrations, especially for couples who have suspended their marriages due to the pandemic, Lim said.
But for many of those who take the classic direction of wonderful Indian weddings, it’s worth doing, even if they’ve had to change their plans several times along the way.
“I dreamed of having a beautiful wedding,” Bhojwani said of their wedding in April. “It was really difficult, it was delayed for 3 years, but despite everything they gave us. We definitely value it. “
Read the article on Insider