The Dreams Macao Beach in the Dominican Republic hosts more weddings than any other day of the year.
During a recent tour of the all-inclusive resort, the sales manager told me that the resort holds more than one wedding a day.
During my stay at the resort, I stumbled upon three separate beachfront wedding ceremonies. Two of the three were on the same beach at the same time.
The Dreams Macao Beach is not an outlier when it comes to weddings. A representative from AMResorts told advisors that their sister resort Dreams Onyx is hosting around 400 weddings annually.
By now most resorts and travel advisors have worked through the many weddings that had to be re-scheduling or postponed due to the Pandemic as well as the many "sequel weddings" that served as follow-ups to Covid-era courthouse weddings and other more scaled-
There is an off-the-charts amount of demand for destination weddings.
Kim Goldstein, president of Virginia-based Journeys Travel, said during a panel discussion that the biggest trend on the destination wedding front is the fact that it's exploding.
There are a lot of destination wedding requests. The groups are larger, they all want to travel together, and our groups are booking out over 80% to 85% of the room block that we're securing, which is pretty impressive." More people are RSVPing yes.
Laurie told me that destination weddings accounted for 4% of the total wedding market in Canada when she founded her romance travel-focused agency. She thinks that the share is around 20%.
More and more, destination weddings at all-inclusive resorts are becoming more sophisticated.
While tried-and-true all-inclusives in Mexico and the Caribbean are still top picks, a growing number of couples are looking at all-inclusives a bit farther off the beaten path.
Some wedding couples want to beat their friends. They have been invited to friends' weddings in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. They are looking for more unique destinations since they are not going to do the same thing.
As Hyatt's AMResorts portfolio and other all-inclusive brands familiar to North American travelers make further inroads into Europe, we see an opportunity to bring more destination weddings to markets like Spain and Greece.
AMResorts has a number of properties in Greece and Spain. The Dreams Madeira Resort Spa & Marina will be opening in Portugal in 2024, and the company will also be opening a property in Bulgaria.
Is it possible that Bulgaria could one day be an all-inclusive, destination wedding hot spot? A lot will depend on how easy it is for friends and family to come.
It's really about the amount of direct airlift there is. I'm not sure how strong the airlift is in Bulgaria. If we're talking about countries like France, Italy, Greece, and Spain, then definitely.
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