Yesterday's grand opening of a wedding chapel at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort & Spa marked new business for the resort, and some say it will also boost Hawai'i's lucrative visitor wedding market.

Best Bridal Hawaii built the $6 million Ocean Crystal Chapel on space leased by the Hilton Hawaiian Village and operates the 4,000-square-foot, two-story facility. It expects the chapel to have 800 weddings in the first year, with that figure eventually doubling, said vice president Karen Mukai. Hilton gets increased business from wedding couples and families staying at the hotel, as well as food-and-beverage services.

The new chapel — which had a "soft opening" Jan. 29 — should benefit Hawai'i's visitor wedding market as a whole, said Hawai'i Tourism Authority president and CEO Rex Johnson.

"Any new facilities are good for the overall market," Johnson said. "It will give people more choices for their weddings and therefore more people will be thinking about weddings in Hawai'i. And if you look at a place like the Hilton, my guess is they're going to fill that thing up in pretty short order. And it will just drive demand all around the marketplace."

The wedding market is high on the tourism industry's agenda, Johnson said. Such visitors tend to spend more money here, and the bride and groom usually bring family and friends.

Hilton decided to work with Best Bridal Hawaii — a local subsidiary of Japan-based Best Bridal Inc. — and have a chapel on-property because the hotel alone would not be able to break into the Japanese wedding market, said Gary Seibert, area vice president and managing director of Hilton Hawaii.

"They bring a market to us," he said. Seibert has said it's the only freestanding chapel within a hotel on Waikiki Beach.

While Best Bridal Hawaii's customers are primarily Japanese visitors, the company is working to generate more business from Mainland tourists as well, said vice president Mukai. Packages at the Ocean Crystal Chapel at the Hilton start at $4,500, she said.

Watabe Wedding Corp., the largest organizer of overseas weddings for Japanese, said the overall Japanese wedding market in Hawai'i has been growing, albeit at a moderate pace. Watabe operates four chapels on O'ahu and caters primarily to Japanese couples.

There were 22,470 Japanese weddings in Hawai'i in 2004, a 10 percent increase over the previous year, said Watabe public relations representative Donald Amemiya. Figures for 2005 were projected at about 23,500 weddings, and about 24,700 weddings are expected this year, he said.

Amemiya also said the Hilton's new chapel should help the overall wedding market.

"Hopefully, what we like to see is other companies such as Best Bridal coming up with new wedding venues to increase the overall number of this market," he said. "We want to see a bigger pie instead of everybody nibbling at the same piece of pie. So any new venue, I think, is welcome for the entire Hawai'i market."

But Amemiya said the industry needs to make sure not to build too many chapels "and then after a while every one of them seems to look alike and the people lose interest in what we're doing here."

Hawai'i is not at that point, he said. "But if you look at a market like Guam, I think that's what they're coming across now. A majority of the major hotels, they have chapels on their beachfront locations. That's just oversaturating the market, and people are beginning to lose interest in that."

Reach Lynda Arakawa at larakawa@honoluluadvertiser.com.