The impending May Day wedding boom is driving up Chinese consumers’ pent-up demand for wedding-related products following the country’s successful control of the coronavirus pandemic.
The search volume of wedding services during the May Day five-day holiday starting from May 1 on Alipay rose four times from last year, according to Alipay’s official Weibo account on Wednesday.
The number of weddings scheduled during the five-day holiday has grown significantly, more than the weddings the country witnessed during the National Day holiday in 2020, an owner of a Chongqing wedding logistics company surnamed Chen told the Global Times on Thursday.
Chen added that his company almost went under, for there were not many weddings held last year after the coronavirus hit. Consequently, all the scheduled weddings which did not take place in 2020 have been put off to this year.
It is tricky to arrange wedding ceremony stuff involving videographers, photographers, makeup artists, and event hosts as many of them are fully contracted, and the price of hiring them has shot up, Chen noted, adding that wedding decoration materials will be hard to find before the coming May Day holiday.
Wedding photo studios have been fully booked for the five-day holiday, according to a source from a top-ranking wedding photo studio on the online sharing platform Dazhong Dianping.
Jiang Zhixin, the founder of a bakery store in Yinchuan city of Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, told the Global Times that he is preparing food and cakes for three weddings that will be held during the May Day holiday. He estimated that his income could increase by 30 percent for the holiday.
The number of people searching for “marriage registration appointments,” “premarital medical check-up,” “wedding photo service,” “flower reservations,” and “wedding car rentals” increased 265 percent, 108 percent, 950 percent, 350 percent and 173 percent, respectively, according to Aliyun’s Weibo post.
A traditional Chinese wedding ceremony is held in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, Nov. 16, 2020. A Confucius School in Guiyang invited eight couples to hold a traditional Chinese wedding, which was based on the ceremony of Zhou Dynasty (1046BC — 256BC). (Photo: China News Service/Qu Honglun)
