NEWS| 250 weddings cancelled in Jaipur due to lockdown in April-June quarter
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Many hotels and resorts have come up on the city outskirts to leverage the city’s popularity as a wedding destination.
Around 250 weddings with budgets of over Rs 25-30 lakh each have been canceled or postponed in the April-June quarter, according to estimates by the hospitality industry in Jaipur. While the lockdown in the state has been extended to June 8, weddings are prohibited till June 30. The three months (April-June) had over 30 days of auspicious dates for weddings.
On average, hotels and resorts on the city outskirts, in the Kukas area, get over 40% of their revenues from weddings, while for some individual properties, the segment contributes as high as 70% of their business. Chandrasekhar Joshi, general manager of The Leela Palace Jaipur, said, “The industry had a pretty decent recovery, primarily riding on the weddings that started from October last year till March this year. But April-June quarter has been a washout due to the second wave of the pandemic. In all likelihood, the industry might have lost about 250 big weddings.” In value terms, Joshi said, conservatively, the revenue loss could be Rs 100 crore.
July has six auspicious dates and after that, the hotels will have to depend on domestic tourists as there is no clarity on when the foreign tourist movement, corporate travel, and MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions) activities will restart.
Akash Agarwal, director at Rajasthali Resort and Spa, said, “We get 65% of our business from weddings. It shows the loss of business opportunities we have suffered. Even though there are no weddings and no tourists, we pay a salary to 30 people to maintain it. Covid has hit the hospitality industry hard.”
In fact, in the absence of tourists, many hotels which were not highly dependent on weddings changed their strategy. Joshi said, “That strategy helped them to stay alive. In fact, they did well last year to recover substantially.”
