Pookie's Moon Palace Wedding Review *Long W/ Pictures*

[MoonPalacePookie]

Wow this is so crazy, it seems like just months ago I started planning my wedding and now I'm married. Not sure what I'm going to do with myself now. I figured I need to get this out of the way before I get super busy at work, so here it goes:

LOCATION Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort, Cancun Mexico
WEDDING DATE July 23, 2008
NUMBER OF GUESTS 52
DATES AT RESORT July 18-28
HONEYMOON To be determined later, we're thinking the new Palace resort in Punta Cana in February, but its up in the air for now.


MOON PALACE RESORT: A-
We have been to the resort three times before the wedding and loved it everytime. I gave the minus grade because this time the resort seemed to be pretty much at capacity. Service was still great, but not as good as it was in the past and all employess seemed overworked. I have never seen that many people at the resort at the same time before, so there were longer waits for restaurants and less personalized service, but still great.



FOOD: AThe food is great for an all-inclusive resort, the best part is the large number of restaurants on property, providing lots of food selection. Lunch and breakfast were pretty much the same everyday, which is fine. A few times they brought our a taco stand to the pool and made awesome tacos, so no complaints there.



ROOMS: A-The rooms are beautiful with lots of marble, large screen flat TVs and alcohol dispensers. Maids do a great job cleaning and restocking the rooms daily. Our only complaint is our safe had a glitch and while we asked for a maintenance person, no one ever showed up to fix it. The good news is we had money and documents in our room the entire time and nothing was taken.



POOL/ACTIVITIES: A
The hotel has a large pool in every lobby and there are lots of activities to do onsite and free tours offsite. The people who book the tours are very helpful and knowledgeble.



WEATHER: A+++
I know this is not important, but I thought I'd include it becuase it was such a huge part of my wedding. Sunday (three days before my wedding), tropical storm Dolly hit Cancun, it rained for two days straight and the wind was crazy. I was a nervous mess, especially since they shut down all public places (lobbies, restaurants, etc) one night becuase of the storm and made us go to our rooms. I had images of spending my wedding day in a hurricane shelter. The weather cleared by Tuesday, and Wednesday (the wedding day)was beautiful once again. It was actually a bit cooler than the rest of the days, I was so worried guests would melt during the reception, but it turned out perfect. So I guess you can worry about it, but sometimes things just work out.



WELCOME DINNER: A
Since we did not use our free group restaurant reservation for our wedding, we decided to use it for a welcome dinner. We knew we had about 28 guests coming the first night, so we had our WC make a reservation at the Brazilian restaurant for us. The table setup was outside, it was beautiful, they even had flowers for us. It felt so weird sitting at the head of the table, that was the first time it hit me that we were actually there to get married.


REHEARSAL COCKTAILS: A
We did a cocktail party the night before the wedding for an hour. The cocktail party usually comes with appetizers but asked for Mexican style desserts instead as this was later in the evening. The desserts were amazing and everyone had a great time. The party was at the North Solarium which is a raised platform overlooking the pool, I could not have picked a better location.

[MoonPalacePookie]

WEDDING COORDINATOR: A
Name: Cristina Suarez
Cristina was very helpful and responsive, when I met with her before the wedding, she remembered things I asked her that I forgot I even asked. She did mess up my centerpieces by not putting water in them (I had floating flowers that just sat on the bottom of the vase), but quickly fixed that once I told her. Everything was perfect, she followed the directions I gave her for decorations and just did an overall great job. We spent about 2 hours going over the order of the bridal party and all the small stuff I didn't even know existed, she was right on the ball.

A funny story, while we were taking pictures after the ceremony, our reception site was being set-up, we found out later that my WC drove a golf cart straight into our buffet table (there was no food on it yet). So we have a picture of that too.



HAIR / MAKE UP: A+++++++++++++++
Name: Alberto (dont know his last name) at the Sunrise Salon
Alberto was god. I watched him work on another bride while i got my nails done and he did an awesome job. I had pictures from magazines of what I wanted and he did such an awesome job, I looked just like the girl in the picture, it was perfect, could not be happier with both my hair and make-up.



PHOTOGRAPHER: A-
We used the hotel photographer and I think he did a great job. We upgraded to the next highest package (included ceremony, beach pictures and 2 hours of reception). He did an amazing job during the ceremony and the beach session, he was such a professional and the pictures turned out great (posted in a separate thread). My only problem is that he was supposed to do 2 hours of pictures during the reception, but most of the time he just stood there and watched. I thought there were so many great opportunities for photos, but we ended up with about 20, so not too happy with that, but he totally redeemed himself with the beach photo session.



VIDEOGRAPHER:A (I think)
We received our DVD right before we left and have not had a chance to watch it, but the videographer was very attentive and seemed to be doing a great job of capturing the ceremony.

FLOWERS: B
I had a lot of issues trying to get the flowers I wanted. I wanted orchids but they were not included in my free bouquet and they would not budge on the very high price. In the end, I decided on roses and cala lillies (alcatraz in Mexico) and think the bouquet turned out great. It was so incredibly heavy, I felt bad tossing it to the girls. The only reason for the bad grade is the price of the flowers, they were outrageously expensive. The simple cala lilly bouquet i wanted for my BMs was $120 each. So my mom, who is a florist, bought one of the hotel's centerpices of long stemmed calla lillies (the centerpiece had 12 flowers), split it into 4 bouquets of 3 flowers each and tied it with ribbon we brought from home. They turned out beautiful and cost us all of $70. Yay mom.



HORSE CARRIAGE: A+++
This was the best part of the entire wedding. Some of the guests did not know about it and as the carriage rounded the corner i heard everyone go "AHHH" it was just perfect, wouldn't trade that for anything.



CEREMONY: A
Our ceremony was originally scheduled for the Tucan Terrace at 4 pm. The night before the wedding my WC asked me if we wanted to move it to the Bugambilia Terrace as it was on the Sunrise side (Tucan is in Nizuc) and much closer to the Lake Terrace where the reception would be. We agreed to do it and it was a great choice, the two gazebos are pretty much the same, except Tucan has a much longer walk up to it.

The ceremony was great, the JOP did a beautiful job reading some Mexican wedding thing (I have not clue, I was so nervous I did not hear a thing, but everyone else loved it). He also read our sand ceremony for us, which we were not sure he could do becuase the hotel said he could not, so just keep pushing your WC until they agree. We did the champagne toast after the ceremony and cut the cake, it was nice to get pictures of that.



RECEPTION: A
Our reception was on the Lake Terrace at 6pm. The reception was perfect, we brought all our own decorations, napkins, favors and centerpieces. We got a free cake and they decorated it using a picture we gave them, it was not the most professional looking cake ever, but it looked like the picture and was good. We had the Carribean buffet and the food was amazing, everyone commented on how great the food was. The waiters did a great job and the bartender was great. We rented umbrellas for the tables, i would totally recommend doing that ($25 a piece) to keep the sun off the guests.



DJ: A+++++
We did not do a DJ for the wedding, we just rented the equipment from J&S Audiovisual Mexico, the company recommended by the hotel. We used an IPhone for music and had a friend do the MCing. The equipment came with a "technician" who actually spoke great English, knew all the wedding traditions and walked our MC through the entire process, he was just amazing. They also had colored lights that came with the equipment (we did not realize they did, so it was a wonderful bonus) and everyone loved them. These guys just did an amazing job.



Overall the wedding was wonderful, there were a few small things that went wrong, like the centerpieces not having water and our Best Man showing up in the wrong colored shirt, but in the big picture, the wedding went wondefully, the hotel staff knew exactly what they were doing and made my time so much more enjoyable.

[tvt]

It all looks great! I want to go back to Moon Palace now!

[Davematthews16]

Your review was so clean and neat :) So glad you had a good time! Also, SO glad the hurricane passed and you were able to stick to your original plan. Thanks for the info!

[ashrose]

Thanks so much for the review! :)

I've been stressing lately that I'll come with my linens/napkins/centerpieces and the wedding cooridnator won't set them up for me -- its good to know that they were so accomadating with you. :)

[MoonPalacePookie]

Originally Posted by ashrose

Thanks so much for the review! :)

I've been stressing lately that I'll come with my linens/napkins/centerpieces and the wedding cooridnator won't set them up for me -- its good to know that they were so accomadating with you. :)

I gave her 2 boxes of stuff and a document outlining step by step directions for the set-up. I also did a mock up at home and included pictures for her (I'm a business analyst, I'm a bit more detailed than normal). She did everything, she did ask that I send BMs to help her set-up and I forgot, but she had a bunch of people helping her, so it worked out.

[ashrose]

Pookie... it doesnt suprise me that you are a business analyst... I am too!

[weddingchick]

Great review. Yay for florist moms who save the day!!!

[Carolyn]

Great review. Everything looked beautiful.

[Angel]

Great review. You looked very beautiful. The horse and carriage was really nice. I want that now.