Costs & ComparisonsYou have been asked to shortlist a destination for an Indian wedding or an incentive group, and the cost figures available to you are either brochure numbers or somebody’s guess in a group chat. This article sets out what is published on cost for Vietnam, Bali and Thailand, marks clearly where no reliable published figure exists, and names the points at which Vietnam will cost you more rather than less. We are Xtravel, the India desk of VINATAT Group, a Vietnamese operator running since 2011 — we sell Vietnam, and there are briefs on which we will tell you to book Thailand.
All market figures in this article were read on 24 August 2026.
The published figures, side by side
| What you are pricing | Vietnam | Bali | Phuket, Thailand |
|---|---|---|---|
| High-end Indian wedding, full budget | INR 40 lakh – 2 crore | INR 60 lakh – 3 crore | 100 guests, 3 nights: INR 70 lakh – 1.2 crore. 150 premium guests: above INR 1.2 crore |
| Per head, 3 nights, 4–5 star resort | No reliable published figure — build your own using the checklist below | INR 35,000 – 65,000 | INR 40,000 – 70,000 |
| Relative pricing | Published wedding range starts lower than Bali’s | Baseline | Roughly 15–25% above Bali |
| Entry for Indian passports | e-visa: USD 25 single entry, USD 50 multiple entry, 90 days, official processing three to five working days, evisa.gov.vn | Not researched for this article — verify current Indonesian entry rules | Visa-free, 60 days, in force to 2026 |
The bottom of the Vietnam range is the whole answer to “is Vietnam cheaper”: INR 40 lakh against Bali’s 60 lakh. That is a statement about published ranges, not a promise about your event.
The empty cell matters as much. There is no per-head Vietnam figure we consider reliable enough to print, and we will not invent one to fill a column. If a supplier hands you a tidy Vietnam per-head number, ask which properties, which season, which meal plan and which year before it goes to your board.
One warning on the last row. Entry policy is government policy and it changes, so verify Thai and Vietnamese rules with the relevant authorities at the time of travel. The three-to-five working day e-visa window is the official processing time, not a commitment. Build a buffer.
What moves you from the bottom of a range to the top
INR 40 lakh to 2 crore is a spread of five times, and you cannot take a five-times spread to a family or a board. Five variables decide where inside it you land. We are not attaching rupee values to them, because we do not have sourced ones.
- Guest count, and how many of those guests need rooms.
- Buy-out or room block. A full buy-out changes the shape of the whole budget.
- Number of nights, and how many carry a full function.
- How many elements must be flown in from India rather than sourced in country.
- Season, including whether your date sits inside a storm window.
Have every property quote against the same five, or the numbers coming back will not be comparable.
Where Vietnam is genuinely cheaper
The saving sits in whole-property hire. For a large-guest-list Indian wedding the biggest single cost block is usually rooms plus venue plus food bought as one buy-out, and that is where the published Vietnam range starts below Bali’s.
We do not have sourced data telling us why it starts at INR 40 lakh, so treat the gap as something to test in quotes rather than as a rule. A property that has never run an Indian wedding can quote low and add lines back later. Price for that risk from the start: kitchen usage, generator power, noise dispensation for a late finish, extra housekeeping after a late-night sangeet. Ask for every exclusion in writing before you compare anything.
Flights help the arithmetic. Direct India–Vietnam sectors run four to five hours on Air India, Vietnam Airlines, VietJet and IndiGo, out of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad, with one-way fares from around INR 12,000–14,500. For a guest list drawn from several Indian cities, that spread of departure points is worth real money. Those are published individual fares. Ask each airline what a block for your numbers costs, because that is the figure you will pay.
Where Vietnam is not cheaper: the visa
Thailand is visa-free for Indian passport holders for 60 days, in force to 2026. Vietnam requires an e-visa through evisa.gov.vn. At USD 25 a head the fee looks trivial. On a hypothetical 400 guests it is USD 10,000 — arithmetic, not a quoted figure — and the fee is the cheap part. The expensive part is the file. Four hundred e-visas means 400 passport scans, 400 photographs at the correct specification, 400 sets of dates matching the actual flights, and a chase list for the guests who send their documents late. There will be one. Every typo is a resubmission. Every resubmission is a working day. There is no counter you can walk up to and escalate at.
Work your document deadline backwards: the official three to five working days per file, plus a resubmission cycle for the errors you know you will get, plus your own collection window. Budget the whole thing as coordinator hours from the day you take the brief. If your guest list will not be firm until, say, three weeks out, Thailand’s visa-free entry is worth more to you than Vietnam’s lower published range, and Vietnam has no answer to that.
Send us four lines and we will send back a breakdown
Your target dates, your guest count, the Indian cities your guests fly from, your catering requirement. We return a breakdown by cost item, with the open lines marked as open. We quote per event, because no two are the same.
+84 92 4567 333 · Hoang@vinatat.vn
Where Vietnam is not cheaper: the supply chain behind the wedding
Bali’s Indian-wedding infrastructure is far deeper than Vietnam’s. Indian cooking teams, mandap fabrication, dhol players and priests are available locally there. Vietnam’s layer is thinner, which means some elements are flown in from India.
Flying elements in carries costs that rarely appear on a first comparison sheet. There is no published range for this that we trust, so here is the structure instead. Put your own unit prices against it.
| Flown-in element | Cost lines to price | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Cooking team, musicians, priest | Return airfare, room nights, per diem, local transfers | Per person, per night, per day |
| Decor and mandap components | Air freight or excess baggage, packing, on-site assembly labour | Per kg, per crate |
| Customs handling | Clearance time, storage or demurrage if held | Per day, and who carries the charge |
| Anything held at the border | Contingency and a substitute plan | Percentage of that budget line |
Catering is the clearest case. We work with partner kitchens producing strict Jain food, both North and South Indian, in Hanoi, Da Nang and Phu Quoc. We do not have a partner kitchen in Ho Chi Minh City. Sapa has no on-site Jain kitchen, so food there has to be handled differently, and we will explain how rather than pretend the problem is not there. Kitchen usage fees charged by hotels for outside catering teams are very common in Vietnam and there is no dependable published range for them. Treat that as an open line until the property confirms a number in writing.
There is a venue-experience gap as well. Da Nang recorded more than 50 destination weddings across 2025, which shows a market growing rather than a market that is mature. Ask each property how many Indian weddings at your guest count it has run, and get the answer in writing. Budget for longer site inspections and a far more detailed written operating brief than a mature market would require.
If you want Vietnam on next year’s list, the deadline is January
Indian company MICE budgets are typically locked between January and March, for a financial year starting 1 April. A Vietnam proposal landing in May is competing for money already allocated. The destination comparison has to be in front of your finance team by January.
The other calendar item is weather. Central Vietnam’s storm season runs roughly from September to November. If your date is fixed inside that window and your venue must be on the central coast, say so at the briefing stage. The honest options are a different region, a different month, or a covered alternative for every outdoor element plus a written cancellation and postponement clause stating who carries the cost.
Compare like for like
A comparison only works if both quotes describe the same event. Print this, send it to both destinations, and compare what comes back.
| Ask both destinations | Vietnam answer | Thailand answer |
|---|---|---|
| Buy-out or room block — quoted the same way? | ||
| Kitchen usage fee, as a number in writing, or stated as not applicable | ||
| Which elements are flown in, and who pays freight, crew flights and crew rooms | ||
| Visa handling — who chases documents, and how many coordinator hours | ||
| Noise curfew, licence and generator cost for a late finish | ||
| Wet-weather alternative, with its own price | ||
| Cancellation and postponement terms, in writing | ||
| Deposit schedule, payment stages, contract currency, exchange-rate risk | ||
| Alcohol: bar pricing, corkage, licence | ||
| Outdoor ritual permissions — baraat horse, fireworks, open flame | ||
| Group airfare block for your numbers | ||
| Event and medical insurance, including older guests | ||
| Indian weddings at your guest count already run here |
When we would tell you to book Thailand
If your guest list will not be firm until close to departure, Thailand’s visa-free entry outweighs Vietnam’s lower published range. If your family expects a full Indian wedding ecosystem available locally, Bali is further ahead than Vietnam is. If you need a property with a documented record of Indian weddings at your scale and will accept nothing less, that record is easier to find in Phuket than in Vietnam today. We would rather lose an enquiry on those grounds than take an event we cannot run properly.
Why you are being asked about Vietnam at all
Three sets of figures explain the demand behind the question:
- Around 750,000 Indian arrivals in 2025, up by nearly 50 per cent, and more than 242,000 in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up over 169 per cent.
- Quang Ninh hosted six weddings for ultra-wealthy Indian families in the first four months of 2026. Da Nang recorded roughly 101 MICE groups carrying about 28,428 delegates in the first five months of 2026.
- In Phu Quoc, one Indian industrial family took a full resort buy-out for seven days for more than 1,000 guests.
We have run three Indian MICE and wedding groups in Vietnam, across Da Nang, Phu Quoc and Sapa, and Indian agents are sending us groups now. We share the size and dates of those groups on a call, not on a public page — the same reason your event will not appear here either.
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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