WEDDING TOURISM. FEATURES, STATE AND PROSPECTS

Wedding tourism is an important part of the emerging tourism industry. Tourism motivations are an important factor in understanding people's destination choice behavior, especially for the wedding market. Wedding tourism can be viewed as a complex cluster of interconnected stakeholders, and a high degree of coordination and cooperation is necessary for destinations to be competitive. Wedding tourism has an impact not only on tour operators who organize wedding events, but also on the transportation, accommodation and catering sectors. Consumers of the wedding tourism market are wedding couples and their guests, as well as tourists who choose a wedding trip or a wedding. The article examines the definition of the concept of «wedding tourism» by different authors, generalizes and clarifies this concept. The article proves that nowadays wedding tourism should be considered as a separate type of tourism. The author points out the peculiarities of wedding tourism: the presence of a sufficiently large number of participants of different professional orientation necessary for the preparation and conduct of wedding tours, the difference between the purpose of wedding tours and classical ones, the individual and exclusive nature of such tours, participation of tourists of different age categories in wedding tours, etc. The authors propose a system of classification of wedding tours according to the following criteria: duration of wedding tours, types of destinations, countries of wedding tours, budget, form of organization, and additional risks. The most popular destinations in the world for organizing wedding tours are also considered. In order to substantiate the prospects for the development of wedding tourism in Ukraine, a correlation and regression analysis of the dependence of the number of domestic tourists on the number of marriages in Ukraine was performed. The analysis showed that there is a certain relationship between these indicators. A linear function was built that allows predicting the development of this type of tourism in Ukraine in the near future. It is noted that in the period from 2000 to 2006 there was a significant increase in the birth rate in Ukraine, which gives grounds for increasing the interest of young people in wedding tourism in the coming years. The authors conclude that a promising area for tourism enterprises in the near future in the field of domestic and outbound tourism is the creation of tourism products that would integrate wedding ceremonies and travel.The article draws attention to the fact that in addition to wedding ceremonies, travel and weddings, events and travel aimed at celebrating wedding anniversaries may become promising in the future. The article identifies promising areas for further research, which involve a more detailed study of emerging tourist regions. Integration of offers of tour operators and all other wedding tourism service providers can bring high profits and become popular offers for wedding tourists.