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Four weddings and honeymoons experts tell Abra Dunsby how their businesses are faring, with tips for agents looking to grow their share of the market
“I became a member of the National Association of Wedding Professionals [NAWP] in 2019 when I launched the Honeymoon Fixer. They’d never accepted someone working in travel before and it really helped my business take off. It gives me a stamp of approval being both Abta and NAWP-accredited and helps me get referrals.
I’ve put weddings on stop-sale until April next year – it’s hard to put the brides and grooms through the cancellations, and the hours you put in don’t make it worth it.
Active and multi-centre honeymoons have become more popular since the pandemic; lots of people want to do something different. I’m seeing demand for touring in South America, Costa Rica and Asia. Some clients want to increase their budget, others are looking to go short-haul as they’re noticing the squeeze on their finances due to the pandemic. For example, four clients have moved their honeymoon from Mauritius or the Maldives to somewhere short-haul in Europe. Others are moving their honeymoons to 2023.
Weddings are high-value but logistically very tricky. My tip for agents is to work out if you have the capacity to take on that amount of work, and if so, don’t be scared to charge a fee – the couple will understand that your time should be paid for. Charging a fee has helped me when the weddings have ended up being cancelled due to travel restrictions.
My final tip is to always make wedding and honeymoon clients feel special – I send them flowers on their wedding day and give the bride and groom a gift. Those little touches go a long way; the majority of my brides and grooms are now my regular customers.”
“We started attending local wedding fairs again a couple of months ago and have pulled in plenty of honeymoon bookings from them.
I was nervous that people wouldn’t come near us at the fairs but people swarmed to us with questions, and we’ve made various bookings since to destinations including Dubai, the Maldives, Greece and the Dominican Republic, plus we still have appointments coming through off the back of it.
We collate all the data from the fairs and then send out honeymoon mailshots every two weeks with offers and information about who we are and what we do.
We also took a questionnaire with us and asked people when they wanted to honeymoon and where, and are now pushing out relevant offers based on their answers. The Maldives and Mauritius are popular as people feel they can spread out there. Europe is also popular, as are safaris.
We also handed out a leaflet at the fairs on the different honeymoon packages we can offer, and including rewards such as an anniversary dinner worth £100 if they spend a certain amount with us, as well as a free airport lounge.
My tip for other agents is to think about how to attract honeymooners and then make them feel special – we always take them to our VIP lounge and offer them prosecco.
We plan to attend six more wedding fairs in September and October. It costs £100 to attend each time, but we get at least one booking per show worth between £4,000 and £10,000, so it’s definitely worth it.”
“My business partner Noel and I set up agency Travel Soon in 2003 and became a good-sized online player. Then in 2013, we created separate weddings site The Wedding Travel Company and started selling Las Vegas weddings. We sold around 30 weddings a month and evolved from there, adding destinations including Cyprus and Malta.
During the pandemic the wedding business started surging, with an influx of enquiries coming through. Lots of people have fallen in love over the past year. We’ve also had lots of clients coming to us who had their UK wedding cancelled during the pandemic and decided to book one abroad for a year and a half’s time.
We decided to grow The Wedding Travel Company very quickly, taking Travel Soon staff off furlough and training them to deal with the wedding surges.
We now have a team of 27 on weddings and take around 150 bookings a month. At the moment our most popular destinations are Cyprus, Greece and Italy. It’s a good market to be in; we’re making a lot of people very happy and their dreams come true.
We’ve been very busy marketing-wise to push weddings too, and plan on becoming the leading OTA for the sector. We want to start arranging proposal days and stag and hens next too.”
“Over the last 18 months we’ve seen honeymoons on home soil increase in popularity. The pandemic has not only reiterated how much natural beauty and fantastic outdoor adventure there is here, but also the excellent, often underrated hospitality.
With sustainability being more of a concern, especially for Gen Z clients, there is also the added bonus of planning something fabulous domestically while maintaining a low carbon footprint.
Certainly this year, planning a UK honeymoon saves the stress of potential quarantines and testing. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve increased our domestic product, inspired by the uptick in demand. We’ve expanded our Scotland honeymoons to include remote and otherworldly locations, such as Jura in the Inner Hebrides.
Our exclusive Tasting Notes of England with Simon Rogan gourmet journey of discovery in Hampshire, London and the Lake District is another new addition and one that we anticipate continuing to be popular with honeymooners, even after the world opens up further.
We expect that clients will still want to take their long-lusted-after dream trips abroad, but planning a mini-moon before taking a longer international trip – which they can look forward to, perhaps the following year – is a trend we see coming to the fore.”
