CEBU CITY, Philippines – Recently, Cebu has been shortlisted once again as Asia’s Leading Wedding Destination.
Together with Indonesia’s Bali, Thailand’s Ko Samui and Malaysia’s Langkawi, the island province was nominated in the World Travel Awards 2024 as Asia’s Leading Wedding Destination.
This is not the first time the province was named as one of the region’s favorite places to tie the knot. The World Travel Awards also nominated Cebu in the same category in the past six years, the title of which has been kept by Bali.
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Even in 2020, despite the raging Covid-19 pandemic, figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed Cebu as one of the top ten provinces in the Philippines that has the highest number of registered marriages.
And until today, it continues to see a rising trend in marriages.
In celebration of the ‘wedding month’, CDN Digital has compiled data on the number of registered marriages in Cebu from PSA.
Trend
After the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, weddings in Cebu started to bounce back. Latest figures from PSA showed that in 2022, they recorded 22,538 marriages in Cebu, including those from the tri-cities of Cebu, Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue.
It was a roughly 10.5 percent increase compared to the numbers posted in 2021, when state statisticians posted 20,167 registered marriages here.
Due to the mobility restrictions during the pandemic in 2020, understandably, weddings here were cancelled or postponed. Based on the same data from PSA, the number of marriages in Cebu that time fell sharply.
From 20,476 in 2019, it took a nosedive to only 1,084 the following year.
June still favorite month
Sticking to tradition, a lot of couples here prefer to tie the knot every June, based on the 2022 marriage statistics from the PSA.
In that month, a total of 2,613 marriages occurred in Cebu.
It was followed closely by December with 2,544 marriages and then May.
Top 10 areas
The capital Cebu City still posted the highest number of registered marriages in 2022, with 4,370. All top 10 areas where couples tie the knot are all located within Metro Cebu.
Many experts pointed to Cebu’s lively wedding industry as one of the biggest factors on why it has been considered as one of the world’s leading wedding destination. /clorenciana
READ MORE: Cebu named among world’s ‘leading wedding destinations’