I held off on posting this for over a month after my wedding, hoping the venue would meet me in the middle. After two weeks of no response and no real effort toward a solution, I feel obligated to share my experience.
From the start, I was handed off to three different coordinators. I let it go at first, but looking back, it made planning inconsistent and stressful. Two weeks before the wedding, the main planner went on vacation right when deadlines were due, and I had to work with yet another new person.
The day of the wedding, my guests were warned about unauthorized alcohol, and I took full responsibility and followed the contract by closing the bar immediately. That issue was handled and moved on from.
What wasn’t handled professionally was the food. I paid almost $5000 for the catering buyout to bring in my own restaurant and signed a liability waiver. Despite that, staff told guests they couldn’t take leftovers before even speaking to me. I had to go back and forth with the day-of manager just to get them to allow it. Even then, they cleared food off tables while some guests were still eating or had just stepped away, and combined multiple tables’ entrées onto single platters.
I also had a 12-hour rental, yet cleanup started early, and tables were being taken down before our agreed end time. It made us and our guests feel rushed to leave.
I tried to resolve this privately, and was told that they would follow up about this, but I haven’t heard from them in two weeks. Mind you I’ve been consistently trying to contact them via email and phone, but they have been again, not really addressing my concerns and taking an upward of 7-14 days to respond. At that point, I felt I had no choice but to leave an honest review so future couples know what to expect.
My event was supposed to go until 11:00pm, but this is what the venue looked like 10:15pm. My 12-hour rental was from 12:00pm-12:00am, I factored in the last hour for vendors to clean up. However the venue obviously started the cleaning up a lot earlier than expected.