The announcement was made in Vienna, Austria, in the Amour Forum Europe 2019, which began on Sunday and runs until Wednesday, attracting travel consultants, wedding organisers to hotels and European tourist resorts.

The event, which is to take place between 22 and 25 November, is organised by British Worldwide Events, a company that promotes professional conferences, and was first launched in 2017, gathering annually about 100 suppliers dedicated to romantic trips.

The application was a result of a joint work of Turismo de Portugal in the UK, together with Cascais municipality and the wedding organising agency in Portugal White Impact.

“It is a product that can help us break the seasonality in the destinations with sun and beaches and to diversify the tourism activity in other regions of Portugal,” said António Padeira, the director of tourism at the Portuguese embassy in the UK.

Weddings are considered a segment that has gained relevance in business for Portuguese companies in tourism, so they became part of the promotional strategy in the British market.

Jane Palikira, director of Ionian Weddings, British wedding organising agency, recently added Portugal to destinations such as Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Italy and Croatia.

With groups averaging 40 to 80 people, each of these weddings cost between £5,000 to £15,000 (€5,720 to €17,170), not including travel and accommodation.

“Portugal has prices equivalent to Italy. It is about 20% more expensive than Cyrpus or Greece but offers a different quality. Many customers are British who know Portugal as tourists,” she said.

Turismo de Portugal has no estimates of the financial impact of this segment, but the report “Millennial Brides – Born in the 1080s, getting married today” estimated that wedding tourism moves about €10 billion per year, about €8 billion spent by guests in accommodation.