TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: Hotels in Goa will be reverberating to the sounds of Shehnai and drums this monsoons as they throw off the off-season tag and gear up to big time wedding celebrations, a segment that has grown by over 40 per cent this year alone in comparison to the previous two or three years.
While hotels in South Goa have their registers full in terms of bookings for weddings, room occupancies are cent per cent from April through May this year. Starred hotels across the State including central Goa (Panjim and surrounding areas) have reported bookings for weddings till October this year.
Goa Marriott for instance has clocked 40 weddings this year. “This is almost double the number of weddings we catered to last year,” Ranju Alex, General Manager of this river kissing resort at Miramar said.
Till April 2013, she said, Marriott had already crossed the total number of weddings it had hosted in 2012, adding that Goa is getting popular as a wedding destination especially for Indians from Delhi and Mumbai with bookings done at least each wedding lasting four days or more.
Debarchan Bose, Director of Events, Grand Hyatt, Bambolim said, “Since the launch of our hotel in August 2011, we have hosted numerous weddings and this year too most of the auspicious dates have already been booked. This year we have an increase in the wedding business by one-fourth percent.
Most of our wedding clients are from Mumbai, its suburbs, Delhi, parts of North India and international clients from Gulf countries as well.”
Likewise Roydon Fernandes, Assistant Sales Manager of Holiday Inn Resorts, Cavelossim said, “There is a gradual increase in the number of weddings hosted by our hotel and we have catered to all Indian community weddings for Sindhis, Punjabi, Gujarati and others.”
What is interesting is that hotels booked exclusively for weddings have made it difficult for other regular holiday makers to get bookings.
In fact two well known names from industry and sports ~Manguirish Pai Raikar, President of Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Savio Messias of the Goa Football Association told Herald that they too were unable to get rooms for their guests while hosting corporate and sports events.
The hotel industry is upbeat due to the growing popularity of Goa as a wedding destination.
Spokesperson for the Travel and Tourism Industry of Goa Ralph D’Souza said, “It is a fact that Goa has taken off as a wedding destination with much of the promotion done by hotels themselves during the last three to four years.”
The government, he said, had stepped in last year, which is adding further impetus to the marketing of the State as a preferred wedding destination.
According to D’Souza it is not only the five star hotels but also other starred categories and boutique hotels which are hosting weddings. “I think a large chunk of the business to hotels from weddings comes from domestic clientele,” he said adding that the trend is towards hosting weddings and celebrations over three to four days and at different hotels (beach areas, heritage hotels etc) as well.
A tourism ministry official responding to this trend said, “Our tourism promotion campaigns for the next two to three months would centre around Goa as a wedding and honeymoon destination.”
He said that people would now prefer to host a wedding in Goa instead of Thailand.
