Destinations & SeasonsAll figures below read August 2026. Where we cannot verify a number, we leave it blank instead of estimating.
A venue in Da Nang is held for November. Three weeks later the client’s family confirms that the wedding week collides with a festival, forty guests need re-ticketing in a market that has already tightened, and the month chosen sits inside central Vietnam’s storm season. The festival dates were knowable long before the venue was chosen; they were simply not in the brief.
The kitchen deadline does not move
Start here, because this is the deadline that decides everything else. Our Jain catering process runs on fixed lead times, and a festival date that is still provisional at day 14 breaks the first one.
We work with Jain-compliant kitchen partners in Hanoi, Da Nang and Phu Quoc, covering both North Indian and South Indian cooking. Many Jain guests do not eat after sunset — ratri bhojan tyag — which compresses the dinner window and reshapes an evening programme whether or not a festival falls inside it. Festival periods then add fasting days and restricted-ingredient days on top of that standing requirement. Ask the client which days those are and put the answer in the file.
| Lead time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 14 days before | Dietary form closes; the completed form goes to the kitchen partner |
| Between 14 and 7 days | The kitchen returns a signed ingredient list |
| 7 days before | We issue the written confirmation pack to you |
| 24 hours before | Jain meals are re-confirmed in writing |
| On the day | An Xtravel coordinator is present at the kitchen |
If the festival date is still unconfirmed when the dietary form closes, the kitchen is working from a guess, and a signed ingredient list drawn against a guessed date is worth nothing. We will also not promise a dish that a kitchen has not confirmed in writing. If a preparation turns out to be unavailable, you receive that in the day-seven pack, with time to change the evening.
Sapa is the clearest case. There is no Jain kitchen on site, so catering for a Sapa segment has to be planned out of partner kitchens elsewhere and moved by road from Hanoi, which lengthens the lead time. Fix the festival dates earlier for a mountain segment than for a Hanoi or Da Nang one. We have no Jain kitchen partner in Ho Chi Minh City at present.
Your own office is closed at the same time
This is the failure point organisers overlook most easily. The programme is built around the guests’ holiday, and then the planning work itself stalls because the planners are on the same holiday.
Vietnamese suppliers work to Vietnamese public holidays. Your team works to Indian ones. During Onam a Kerala-based coordinator is unavailable. Around Diwali, approvals, transfers and sign-offs slow across many Indian offices. If a confirmation deadline lands inside that window, it will not be met, and the delay does not belong to the supplier.
So the calendar you need is two calendars laid over each other: the guests’ festival dates, and the working days of every person who has to approve something. Deposits, rooming lists, dietary forms and visa applications each need a named owner who is physically at a desk on the day they fall due, plus a named substitute.
Air tickets sit in the same logic. Xtravel does not sell India-Vietnam air tickets; your consolidator or corporate travel desk does that. What we can do is hand them confirmed ground dates early, while the block can still be held in a normal market. Direct flying takes roughly four to five hours depending on the sector, with Air India, Vietnam Airlines, VietJet and IndiGo operating from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad, and one-way fares from about 12,000-14,500 INR.
Three festivals, three different problems
Diwali, Onam and Holi are not interchangeable. They move different groups of people and they strike a programme in different places. Filing them under one line called “Indian festivals” is how a schedule goes wrong.
The dates shift each year against the Gregorian calendar, so we do not publish them. Ask the client for their calendar in writing, because the version that matters is the one their families and their HR department follow, and no supplier should be working from an assumed date.
| Festival | When it applies to your group | Risk to travel days and venue | Risk to your own approval deadlines |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onam | Only where guests, staff or suppliers are of Kerala origin — a Delhi-assembled group may be unaffected | Delegate lists thin; departures split across days | Kerala-based coordinators away; approvals routed through them stop |
| Diwali | Broad; confirm with the client | Corporate and family travel compete for the same seats; if the dates fall inside September-November they also overlap central Vietnam’s storm season | Approvals and transfers slow across many Indian offices |
| Holi | Broad; confirm with the client | Ceremony days may be blocked out even where travel is not | Falls near the Indian budget-setting window of January-March, ahead of the 1 April financial year |
The last column is the one to read twice. A festival that does not touch your guests’ travel can still remove the person who signs your deposit.
Some guests will not travel on certain days
If anyone in the party observes restrictions on travelling on particular days — by festival, by lunar date, by family or community practice — treat it as a hard constraint of the brief, on the same footing as a dietary requirement. It is not a point for negotiation, and it is not something to discover at the re-ticketing stage.
Plan for the possibility that a few guests fly in or out on different days from the main block. Caught at brief stage, that is a rooming and transfer question. Caught two weeks out, it is a ticketing question, and by then the fares have moved.
Put three questions in the brief document, in writing. Are there dates on which any guest will not fly? Are there dates on which the group will not hold a ceremony or a formal dinner? Who has authority to confirm those dates? Keep the answers in the file, not in a WhatsApp thread.
Where Vietnam is the weaker choice
Visas. Indian passport holders need an e-visa for Vietnam: 25 USD single entry, 50 USD multiple entry, valid up to 90 days, applied for at evisa.gov.vn, with a passport valid six months and two blank pages. The published processing time is three to five working days; that window is set by the issuing authority, not by us, so check the current position at evisa.gov.vn when you apply. Thailand grants Indian nationals visa-free entry for 60 days. For a group assembling at short notice around a holiday, that gap is real. It bites hardest when a travel desk is collecting passports centrally and the office closes for the festival.
Weather. Central Vietnam’s storm season runs roughly September to November. Da Nang is a coastal city with a beach beside it, and the storm risk in those months is not something to plan around casually. If your programme window falls there, contract a covered alternative for every outdoor element, fix a written decision point with the venue for switching to it, and consider whether the northern geography — Hanoi, Ha Long, Ninh Binh — suits the dates better. The storm figure we hold is for central Vietnam specifically.
Depth of wedding supply. Bali has a deeper Indian wedding supply base than Vietnam. Vietnam is newer to this market, and the specialist supply chain is still catching up with the arrival numbers.
Geography. Phu Quoc is an island, so its supply chain is an island supply chain and everything must be ordered earlier. Tap water is not drinkable.
Published pricing. Indian destination weddings at the premium end are quoted at roughly 40 lakh to 2 crore INR in Vietnam, 60 lakh to 3 crore in Bali, and 70 lakh to 1.2 crore for 100 guests over three nights in Phuket, with Phuket running 15-25 percent above Bali. There is no per-head Vietnam figure we consider reliable enough to publish. We would rather say that than quote a number we cannot stand behind.
Where Vietnam still works
The demand is not theoretical. Indian arrivals to Vietnam reached around 750,000 in 2025, up about 50 percent, with more than 242,000 in the first quarter of 2026, up 169 percent. The Indian MICE market is valued at 37.75 billion USD in 2025 and projected at 74.12 billion USD by 2031, with incentive travel growing at about 12.85 percent a year.
The Vietnamese side has capacity to match. Da Nang handled about 101 MICE groups and roughly 28,428 delegates in the first five months of 2026, and hosted more than 50 destination weddings in 2025. Quang Ninh recorded six ultra-high-net-worth Indian weddings in the first four months of 2026. In Phu Quoc, one Indian family bought out a resort for seven days for more than 1,000 guests. Da Nang has the largest event capacity of the three destinations we have operated in, with direct international flights and Hoi An and Hue nearby.
Be clear about the two scales involved. VINATAT has operated in Vietnam since 2011 and moves around 5,000 travellers a month on the Singapore-Malaysia route. Xtravel, the India desk, is newer: we have run three Indian MICE and wedding groups here, in Da Nang, Phu Quoc and Sapa. Several Indian agencies send us groups. An Indian has always held the director’s chair at Xtravel. That is policy, not staffing.
What we do not do
We execute on the ground and we do not compete with your creative agency for the event concept. We do not sell to your clients directly, we do not sell India-Vietnam air tickets, and we do not publish photographs of guests.
Six lines for your brief template
- Confirmed festival and observance dates for this group, in writing, from the client.
- Dates on which any guest will not travel.
- Fasting or restricted-menu days falling inside the programme window.
- Indian public and office holidays that intersect your approval deadlines.
- Named decision-maker available on each deadline date, with a substitute.
- Which of the above is still provisional, and the date it will be fixed.
Timing favours anyone who starts early. Indian corporate MICE budgets are typically settled between January and March ahead of the 1 April financial year, and the Indian wedding season runs November-February and April-May with bookings placed 8 to 14 months ahead. Festival dates for those programmes are knowable long before a venue is chosen.
Send us the dates and the headcount. We will map them against the confirmation lead times above, tell you in writing which deadlines fall on days your office is shut, and flag any conflict before you hold a venue. Anything that reaches us inside the 14-day dietary window is a different conversation, and a worse one.
Fix the dates, then the destination, then the price. Reversed, the correction is paid for in air fares.
About Xtravel
Xtravel is the India desk of VINATAT Group, a Vietnamese travel company operating since 2011, holding an international tour operator licence, with offices in northern, central and southern Vietnam. Xtravel is headed by Sreehari Sajeev – “Harry” – our Director, an Indian who lives and works in Hanoi. When you call us, you speak to him, not to a translator. We plan and run programmes on the ground here. We are not a reseller.
Travel like a local.
Talk to the person who will actually be there.
Sreehari Sajeev (Harry) – Director, Xtravel
+84 92 4567 333 · Hoang@vinatat.vn
Xtravel – VINATAT Group · 212 Nguyen Trai, Thanh Xuan, Hanoi
International tour operator licence 01-1082/2018/TCDL-GP LHQTWe don’t publish our clients’ events. Yours won’t be either.
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