Wedding tourism is an up and coming trend in the tourism industry. Seizing the opportunity, Da Nang's tourism industry is striving to build a wedding tourism brand with the message "Where happiness begins" to add this type of tourism into the list of the city's existing tourism products.
The city's tourism industry is stepping up to attract wedding tourism activities in the coming time
Many advantages of becoming wedding tourism destination
In early 2023, an Indian billionaire's family chose Da Nang as a venue to hold a wedding ceremony for their children.
More than 350 guests of both families, more than 100 Indian event staff and chefs, along with tonnes of materials, costumes, and props, were moved from India to Da Nang to prepare for the five-day wedding party.
As a participant in a survey of the potential of Da Nang's wedding tourism market, Dr. Vo Huu Hoa, a lecturer at the School of Tourism under the city-based Duy Tan University expressed his belief that the wedding tourism market will have strong demand and growth in the near future.
Service providers and intermediary service businesses have also devoted a lot of attention and development strategies to this type of tourism. However, Da Nang is still lacking specific regulations and policies to manage, promote, advertise and develop the wedding tourism market.
Chairman of the Da Nang Hotel Association Nguyen Duc Quynh said that Da Nang has many ideal conditions suitable for couples to hold weddings, including having large seaside resorts, large rooms for the organisation of outdoor or indoor wedding parties, a team of chefs who are regularly tested through domestic and international competitions.
Therefore, in recent years, many couples at both home and abroad have chosen Da Nang as a wedding venue, with large wedding sizes of from 50 people to nearly 1,000 people.
Sharing the same opinion, Mr. Cao Tri Dung, Chairman of the Tourism Association, remarked that Da Nang has many advantages for organising wedding parties in terms of the location of resources, service system, infrastructure, human resources, and landscape.
Da Nang is also considered a rising star for wedding tourism. Through recent surveys conducted by the local tourism industry, the city’s most potential customers are from Asian countries, Australia, and New Zealand.
An outdoor wedding space at the Furama Resort Da Nang. (Photo courtesy of Furama Resort Da Nang)
Boosting promotion in potential markets
To lure more wedding tourists, according to Mr. Nguyen Duc Quynh, Da Nang must first become a wedding venue for Vietnamese people, creating competition with other domestic destinations.
Then, he underlined a must-do for the city to increase participation in wedding exhibitions in India and Shanghai (China) or in other wedding exhibitions at major tourism promotion events in Berlin (Germany) and Australia in order to attract more foreign couples to Da Nang to hold their weddings.
Special attention should be paid to introducing Da Nang’s destinations at thematic seminars with the participation of professional wedding organizers, he added.
Mr. Cao Tri Dung added that in recent years, the Tourism Association, the Department of Tourism, and the Da Nang Tourism Promotion Centre have been very interested in this new type of tourism and identified potential markets through surveys to have appropriate advertising and promotion plans.
Da Nang can form a wedding ecosystem from professional wedding organisers by introducing to them the city’s infrastructure and services that meet the needs of guests.
He shared that the business community was very welcoming and deeply involved in the value chain serving wedding services; and at the same time considered it a special product, significantly contributing to the development of Da Nang to become a city of festivals and events.
“The Tourism Association and the business community have planned to establish a thematic group of businesses with ecosystems serving weddings. From this group, resources will be mobilised, along with State agencies and promotion agencies to form more specific products and product packages under the Da Nang brand. Also, the group will be in charge of looking for partners who can coordinate deeply such as airlines, wedding catering units, and destination promotion units from abroad, to promote deeply into potential markets” Mr. Cao Tri Dung unveiled.
He emphasised that Da Nang is one of the leading localities in organising wedding events. The business community proposed the city leaders to announce their own policies, and facilitate companies to organize wedding parties and have attractive incentives to attract more customers.
According to Director of the Da Nang Tourism Promotion Center Nguyen Thi Hoai An, developing wedding tourism is one of the ideas long cherished by people working in the tourism sector, and as part of the plan to diversify the market and expand more customer markets.
She emphasised the need for the city to exert great efforts to develop wedding tourism into a new product and build the Da Nang wedding destination brand.
Currently, the city’s Tourism Promotion Centre is drafting the Da Nang Wedding Tourism Development Plan during the 2024 - 2025 period, and pilot policies to attract more wedding tourists.
It is planning to organise more wedding tourism-related events such as wedding fashion shows; and conferences and seminars on wedding tourism.
In the coming time, the centre will strive to connect new routes to further attract wedding guest markets and the message "Where happiness begins" will be part of the communication and marketing plan for Da Nang wedding destination in the 2024-2025 period.
Reporting by Thu Ha - Translating by M.Dung