Wedding specialist Perfect Weddings Abroad has expanded its services by launching a seperate website for honeymoons.
It has offered a small number of honeymoons on request in the past, but Danny Waine, director, said the Lichfield-based company was now ready to create a new standalone product for the honeymoon market – Perfect Honeymoons Abroad.
He said: “Perfect Weddings Abroad has been flying; it’s been a great year and we have been very happy with the response we have had.
“We launched a new website back in June and we have really invested in that and it’s paying off.
“We have had great sales too – this year we are up 150% year on year. In 2012, we were up 56% on 2011. So the time really seemed right to expand into honeymoons.”
Waine said they had noticed a lot of couples booking weddings abroad on a limited budget who were then going on to book more expensive honeymoons elsewhere. “It was obvious this was something we needed to be offering too,” he said. “There was no reason why we shouldn’t be getting their custom.”
“This is something we’ve been keen to do for a couple of years now. It’s definitely been in our minds to do it but it was a case of waiting for the business to grow enough so that we could take it on.”
The new honeymoons venture will focus on the Caribbean, Mexico, the Indian Ocean and the Far East, with Waine keen to build upon relationships already in place with hotels from the wedding side of the company.
“We will specialise in what we are calling multi-moons – tailor made, multi-centre itineraries,” Waine said. “With that extra service and specialism, we won’t be competing with the internet.”
Waine said the company had an expansion strategy in place and was keen to take on more office-based staff as well as more homeworkers. Currently, it employs 10 office-based staff and 20 homeworkers.
The company’s move in to the honeymoon market comes a year after US-based Destination Weddings Travel Group invested in it.
Group chief executive Richard Calvert said: “With record sales and customer satisfaction levels in the UK, we feel it’s the ideal time for Pefect Weddings Abroad to widen its portfolio and launch Perfecthoneymoonsabroad.co.uk.”