The Istria County Tourist Board organized the first Istria Wedding MeetUp in cooperation with partners – WeddingsInCroatia, StudioBrzak weddings & events, Lepor Weddings, and Flammeum weddings & events – held on October 14 at the Parentium Plava Laguna Hotel in Poreč, reports HRTurizam.
The event gathered many local experts from the world of weddings, mainly from the Istrian area, and representatives of local tourist boards, which talked about the latest trends and knowledge in this domain.
“The wedding business segment in Istria is growing from year to year. Although neither Croatia nor Istria is recognized as a major wedding destination globally, Istria has managed to profile itself according to the so-called niche segment of weddings, especially in terms of micro or same-sex weddings. Since this is a complex business discipline in which success requires the cooperation of at least a dozen different activities to create a recognizable wedding product eventually, mutual cooperation and togetherness are of key interest in this business. The County Tourist Board has once again confirmed that this product is essential for Istria because, after a fifteen-year process of restructuring and repositioning, a level of quality of accommodation and service that can be compared with similar destinations in the world has been reached. And the recent accession of Istria to the prestigious association Virtuoso opens countless opportunities for all our entrepreneurs in Istria because they have an open channel to a large number of influential travel advisors, more than 22,000, who decide in which direction and which region to support for a wedding product,” said the Istria County Tourist Board director Denis Ivošević.
Ivošević also announced three new projects within the wedding segment of Istria: a new stylized thematic photo & video shooting, then bringing world-famous wedding planners to get to know the destination and advertising the Istrian wedding offer in domestic and foreign reference media.
Participants could partake in two panels. The topic of the first panel was weddings as a tourist product and the recognition and branding of Istria as a wedding destination, with Denis Ivošević, sales director of Hotel San Canzian from Buje Suzana Vrtičević Tica, owner of WeddingsInCroatia Iva Kraljevic Licardo, owner of Foto Studio Festival from Labin Rajko Borčić and the agent of the Promotion and Sales Service of the Brijuni National Park Flores Marsetič. Petar Jurica, renowned photographer and owner of the Petar Jurica Weddings agency, Arsen Maršanić, wedding organizer and owner of the Noi Due agency, and Martina Rakić, a wedding planner from the WeddingsInCroatia agency, spoke at the second panel on the topic of trends and new formats and where weddings are going in the future.
In addition to the panel, two lectures were organized, one on the topic of digital marketing, i.e., the impact of online communication on the wedding industry, led by Miško Macolić Tomičić from the MarkeThing agency. The second lecture on the very current topic of organizing sustainable events was given by Maja Bosanac, director of the Eventful agency, who presented the novelties of how events should look with particular attention to the environment.
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