Weddings contribute 50% of the events portfolio at JW Marriott Dubai, the hotel’s banquet manager Thomas Inasu revealed at a Hotelier roundtable.
“We have a 50% wedding share. It’s a brilliant wedding market for us,” said Inasu. “We have a whole weddings sales team that is dedicated only to socials and weddings. They’ve been there for quite a while and they do a brilliant job. It’s most of the day’s turnaround for me.”
He added that the business was achieved despite only having a booking window of three months.
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“We have a time window for the wedding booking, which is always a handicap for the team; if not they would have literally taken me over. They can’t book anything over three months out because that’s taking up your space for conferences,” said Inasu.
He said that because of the weekend overlap between the UAE and Europe and the US, conference groups from overseas often booked events over the weekend.
The Meydan director of business development Theresa Dommett said the level of weddings business at JW Marriott was “amazing” and said it was a segment she hoped to grow.
“For us, it’s only about 5-10 % because we’re so new in the market and the weddings that we’ve done have been very special,” said Dommett.
“We’ve got a deck that you can host 1000 people on and you have the skyline of the Burj Khalifa, so it’s beautiful. We hope to grow that more because it is a very lucrative market and we have the space. We have someone dedicated to do the social market. I don’t think it’ll ever be 50%,” she said.
At Emirates Palace, conference and banqueting sales manager Chadi Melhem agreed that weddings were very lucrative.
“For a wedding let’s say, the rate to hire the ballroom is AED 200,000 and we start our menus at AED 550. So, for 1000 people it will cost AED 1,500,000,” said Melhem.
However, he said weddings business contributed “only 10%” of the events business.
“It’s more government, we do more than 60% of our events in government business,” said Melhem
Read the full roundtable report in the June issue of Hotelier Middle East.
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