Exotic Wedding Planning Conference to open in Goa

The big fat Indian wedding market is growing exponentially at the rate of 25 to 30 percent annually, and it is worth Rs. 100,000 to Rs. 110,000 crore with approximately 10,000,000 marriages in a year. With weddings being once-in-a-lifetime events for most people in India and increased spending, capacity of industrialists, businessmen, and upper-class of the Indian society along with the trend of destination weddings setting in, wedding planning has become an integral part of this industry. Blooming interest of tier II & tier III cities in the concept have opened a whole new region to tap the potential in these markets.
 
 

“The niche of wedding planners is growing multifold as an industry but it has to be collaborative to bring out the best of everyone,” Ankit Bhargava, Founder & Chief Wedding Planner, Regal Weddings.

The highly-anticipated ‘The Exotic Wedding Planning Conference (EWPC)’ will be held from July 28 to 29, 2016 at the Hotel Novotel Goa Resort & Spa in Goa, India. EWPC is a premier event that gives an opportunity to seamlessly engage and connect 100+ top notch wedding planners with the luxury brands, hotels and resorts, right local vendors, other wedding essential suppliers and services from across India. This will be a quintessential stage, which will bring the wedding fraternity to discuss the present and future of the wedding industry, strategies to host a celebrity/ big fat Indian wedding and to overcome hurdles in destination weddings through a series of presentations, panel discussions and break out sessions.

Confirmed Steering Committee & Speakers:

Ankit Bhargava, Founder & Chief Wedding Planner, Regal Weddings
Saurabh Agrawal, Founder, Red Events
Harish Babu, Managing Director, Parinaya Wedding Management Solutions
Aarti Mattoo, CMD, Momentum Group
Gunjan Bansal, CEO, L’amore Weddings
Rosemary Ratnam, Proprietor, Rings & Roses
Jai Raj Gupta, CEO, Shaadionline and many more.
Our EWPC 2016 Partners – Raymond Apparel Ltd, Swarovski, VelvetCase.com, Hard Rock Hotel Goa, Blue Sea, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Thomas Cook India, Marriott Group, Taj Hotels Resorts & Palaces, Narayani Heights, Jaypee Hotels Limited, Keys Hotels, Hotel Express Inn, The Corinthians Resort & Club, Chariot Beach Resorts Mahabalipuram, Hotel Hindusthan International Kolkata, Holiday Inn Resort Goa, Tara Jewels Limited, SAJ Earth Resort Cochin, The Resort Mumbai, Cape Weligama (Sri Lanka), Cinnamon Bey Beruwala (Sri Lanka) Grand Uniara Jaipur, InterContinental Hotels Group, Birenderlal.Com.

Ankit D, from the marketing team of Swarovski, says, “We are excited to be part of this conference for the first time. We are looking forward to sharing insights and ideas with the leading creative minds of the buzzing and promising wedding business in India .”

Kapil Hetamsaria, Co-Founder & CEO, VelvetCase.com states that, “VelvetCase is excited and looking forward to the event – it’s a great initiative to bring India’s top wedding planners together. It promises to be a fun, informative and productive event for the Indian bridal industry.”

Rishikesh Shetty, Director for Exito, the company organising the EWPC conference, is proud to mention that EWPC is a global brand and would be spreading its wings internationally to Spain in November 2016 and Dubai, March 2017. With a common trend across the locations surveyed, European countries and cities appeared as either top or emerging destinations. Of these, Italy, Greece, Spain and France were regular mentions across all locations surveyed contributing at least 20% or USD 16.0 billion to the global destination wedding industry worth USD 80 billion.

UAE is discovered to top the charts of the preferred destinations for weddings amongst couples from Middle East, Africa and India. Luxury wedding ceremonies with the number of guests often exceeding 1000 people are very common in the Middle East because tradition is dictating such luxury. So the wedding industry is really flourishing with numerous businesses in the region eyeing their piece. It is estimated that in Qatar, USD 500 million is spent for weddings every year, while in UAE, this number is around USD 700 million. That is the reason we have chosen Dubai as the preferred location to host EWPC for the Middle East region, early 2017.

Gunjan Bansal, CEO, La’more Weddings, concludes, “Wedding industry is changing and expanding at a fast pace and destination wedding would be a huge market to explore. EWPC would bring buyers and sellers on the same platform and it would be setting a trend in the industry.”