Wedding Expo 2012 is slated for April 13-15 to coincide with the Sustainable Tourism Conference, which is scheduled to commence on April 15.
Organisers hope that with this arrangement, delegates visiting for the conference will attend the expo and recognize Guyana’s diverse culture through the 60 booths which will display products and services of small businesses.
At yesterday’s launch, Chief Executive Officer of the Roraima Group of Companies, Gerald Gouveia, pointed out that this is the fourth event of its kind and it is expected to be the biggest.
“This year the wedding expo will be bigger and better… booths are being sold out and I think a lot of companies that weren’t involved the first year, the second year… they came on board the third year and it was such a fantastic success that this time we are seeing a huge response. I think this year’s expo will be fascinating,” he stated.
According to Gouveia, the wedding expo has been a much anticipated event and has grown tremendously.
“When we did the first wedding expo in Guyana, it was a bonanza, it was amazing, it was a festival of colours, of culture, of religion, it was a diversity of Guyanese culture. Every year it has gotten better and better because we’ve had Chinese displays, Amerindian displays and the wedding expo became an amazing tourism event, an event on the tourism calendar in Guyana,” he said.
Tourism is an important component of a country’s economic development, Gouveia said, and through this expo, wedding tourism has been developed.
“We have some wonderful sites in Guyana for people to get married, the Kaieteur Falls, the Baganara Resort, Roraima Duke Lodge, Aracari, amazing places and we want to be able to encourage people from the Caribbean, the US, the UK to come here and get married,” he added.
Also addressing the media was acting Minister of Tourism, Irfaan Ali, who emphasized that much importance lies in the local businesses that advertise during the expo.
“They use this opportunity to exhibit their products and this year they would have that added advantage of having all the major players in tourism from the Caribbean attending the wedding expo,” he said.
However, the minister noted that the product needs to be made stronger since persons who are interested in planning a wedding in Guyana would like to know they can call just one entity and have all their plans made.
“How we can come up with a comprehensive wedding package for Guyana that we can promote on an international market. For this to be achieved there must be some legislative change… that, I can assure, will be raised within the political arena,” he said.
Representative of corporate sponsor, Guyana Telephone & Telegraph Co Ltd, Royston Rachpaul, said wedding tourism was something they had never heard about but events such as this were happening in other Caribbean countries.
He recognized that the wedding exposition assists individual companies and Guyana as a whole, and that he said, is GT&T’s main thrust.
