young women in wedding gowns play with the lone bridegroom as a promotion for the forthcoming Wedding Festival (All About Love) show at the Impact Arena Muang Thong Thani from May 13 to 21.

Couples are becoming less romantic and more guarded about spending money as the uncertain economic and political outlook erodes their confidence in the future, Attapol Itthirattanakomol, deputy managing director of the upscale wedding studio Tonrak, said yesterday.

Attapol said he and others in the wedding business were just aiming to achieve last year's revenue and had little hope of growth.

Overall, the association is hoping the sector maintains its average annual revenue of up to Bt30 billion this year, Attapol said.

Facing stagnant revenues, wedding studios are competing against each other by racing into niches. More and more studios are specialising in a single style of wedding ceremony, such as Thai, western, or teen, and many are offering integrated services, Attapol said.

With about Bt200,000 spent on the average wedding ceremony, including about 300 guests, studios are focusing on getting their clients to spend more rather than on increasing their number, studio owners say.

Many are hoping that the nine-day "All About Love" Wedding Festival at Impact Arena will give them a shot in the arm when it starts on Saturday.

About Bt20 million is being spent to draw up to 200,000 visitors and the association hopes they will spend about Bt200 million at the festival, Attapol said.

He described the festival as a "bold" move, saying it would offer more promotions than any other event in the past few years, including a lucky draw for a Toyota Yaris.

The festival will be spread over 25,000 square metres and will

 have booths from more than 100 companies, including wedding studios, designers, cosmetics companies, beauty centres, spas, souvenir makers, jewellers and furniture manufacturers.

Plenty of wedding planners are also likely to be on hand. Attapol said a new breed of wedding planners was shaking up the sector. In the past, wedding planners were seen as budget busters but the new ones are selling themselves as cost-cutters and time-savers.

Moreover, new technologies have significantly cut the cost of a wedding ceremony, Attapol said.

As a result, tech-savvy wedding planners are playing a bigger role in the business, and many studios are following suit by offering similar services.

The new cost-cutting wedding planners work on ceremonies that cost as little as Bt100,000. Many years ago it would have been unheard of to hire a wedding planner for a ceremony that cost less than Bt10 million, Attapol said.

About 30 per cent of the weddings that take place in four and five-star hotels nowadays use wedding planners, he added.

Nitida Asawanipont

The Nation