Wedding-planning business is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative packages of the creative economics currently in Indonesia, in the form of both traditional and modern celebration service offerings. Keizen as one of wedding planner located in Bandung realized the potential and created enterprise to facilitate customer in preparing their wedding since 2008. The critical spot in this business is catering because it can expand the budget then cause the intolerance dissatisfaction of customer if cannot handled well. Unfortunately, some wedding planners did not rank and consider the catering supplier/vendors based on reasonable criteria. Solving for the most salient determinants in selecting and seeing out the success of catering vendor is an important research topic. This research attempted to determine what strategic criteria of Keizen planners in selecting catering vendor in creating upstream competitiveness. In proposing the strategic criteria, this research used the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach which is known as the decision-making method based on parities comparisons between criteria, to construct an evaluation steps with criteria and associated calculated weights of catering vendors for wedding planners. The findings indicate that AHP approach is useful tool to help support a decision in catering selection. This research is expected the basis for future research to confirm the criteria by doing empirical study directly to catering vendors owned by Keizen, so that planner could rank the vendors based these criteria.

Keywords: Analytical Hierarchy Process; criteria; catering vendors; wedding planner.