The wedding venue was still under construction, but the wooing had already begun.
Six months before the Marriott Marquis Washington, D.C. was to open, Christopher Otway got to work securing the hotel’s first wedding, a 600-person Indian ceremony complete with a horse, multiple choreographed dances and a drone for aerial photographs.
He knew the competition would be stiff: The couple, Monica Vohra and Shalin Shah, were also considering the Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, Va., and the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Centre in National Harbour, Md.
But Otway, director of sales and catering for the Marquis, had a selling point that no one else did: Shalin and Shah could be the first couple to get married at the new convention centre hotel, a property that had been two decades in the making.
“What a talking point that would be for them,” Otway said. “It would be their first wedding here. Nobody else could say that.”
He sat down and wrote them a heartfelt letter. A few days later, Shah and Vohra booked the hotel for their July 5 wedding.
Large Indian weddings — events that can cost six, sometimes seven, figures — are increasingly coveted by the area’s largest and more luxurious hotels as a way to make up for lost government and corporate business.
Meeting rooms that were once filled with conferences and training sessions now sit empty, and Indian weddings, which tend to include several ceremonies over multiple days, have become crucial sources of revenue.
The average cost of an Indian wedding in the United States is expected to hit $250,000 this year, roughly 10 times the national average, according to Indian Weddings Magazine, a San Francisco-based publication.
The Four Seasons Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue has an “Indian-style” wedding package that, for $225 per person, includes a menu of tandoori lamb kabobs, naan pizzas and spicy fish curry.
The Willard in downtown Washington hosts so many Indian weddings that it has created a designated route through Pershing Park for grooms to ride in on horseback. And at the Hay-Adams, wedding packages include flexible timelines to accommodate hours-long ceremonies.
The Washington Post
