Catalonia Riviera Maya

Hey Girls,

 

Do any of you 2010 brides have a copy of the pricelist for all of the extras and the reception costs?

Did any of you go with the wedding package and the reception? Do they take off a bit from the reception costs since you aren't using what they say you get in the package?

 

Also has anyone used a minister instead of the judge?? I remember it being mentioned that a quote was given but I don't know if they ended up using the minister instead. I think Morgan said that the legal ceremonies have to follow a distinct script? Does anyone know anything about this, or is it a general rule and I can go look on another thread?

the legal script is somewhere on the forum. maybe a thread called "share your ceremony script."

 

It's a set thing & some judges will only read it in spanish. Depends on the judge, I think.

http://bestdestinationwedding.com/fo...-script-21660/

Hey L&C in Love , I found the thread only by accident so thought i would post it incase you havent found it on here yet.

 

Its something i hadnt thought too much about at this stage - but may be worth contacting the WC once your date is confirmed.

 

Hello Current and Future CAT Brides

 

Justin & I just came back from having our wedding at the Catalonia Riviera Maya. I've read everything on this thread and all is accurate so I am not going to go through all the details of the wedding since most of the info is on here. However, if you have any specific questions, I'd be more than happy to answer or help in any way. I completely understand the stress that comes with planning a destination wedding so I can help in any way I can. Below I provide some information about our wedding and if you have questions about anything, please contact me.

 

We had 47 guests so we had lots of people at the resort. We arrived on Monday and the wedding was on Friday. Elena is extremely nice and helpful and it was a pleasure working with her. We met with her on that Tuesday to finalize all the plans including picking flowers and meeting with the DJ.

 

We had a rehersal dinner at the Mexican resturant. This was initated by us only. I had all the wedding party meet me at the spot where we are to get married and then we walked through how we wanted everyone to enter. Elena helped us reserve a dinner at the Mexican place for 20 people but she was not part of the rehersal. On the wedding day, people just told her that we rehersed how we wanted to go down the aisle.

 

I had pink roses for my bouquet and white roses for my 6 bridesmaids. I also ordered 2 huge flower arrangements ($50 each) that were set on for the ceremony and then later transfered to the reception.

 

We had a private reception with the Grill menu. It was delicious and everyone really liked the food. The chef grill the meat on the spot. We had about 3 servers, and a bartender. We also hired a DJ for 4.5 hours. It was $100 per hour but since we had lots of guests, I wanted to make sure we had good entertainment. He played exellent music and we were very pleased.

 

Our photographer was Ivan Luckie and he was awesome!! I completely recommend him to anyone. He was there all day and took many, many pictures. He also has a great personality and got along with all the guests. He brought his associate and friend, Giuliana Aranda, and two of them tag teamed and had great picture ideas and were so fun to work with. We also did Trash the Dress. I completely recommend this. We went to the cenotes on Sunday and took some great shots in the water. We won't receive the photos for about 2-3 months but I did see some of them on their camera and they looked amazing.

 

On our last day there, we did the the private dinner on the beach. This included wine, champaine, lobster, steak, and a few other tasty dishes. It was amolutely amazing. They set it up on the beach with lights and romatic music. We had our own server and even the chef came down to ask how the food was. We had an amazing experience and had some time alone which was really nice. Completely worth the money!!!!

 

That is the basic of our wedding. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to post or contact me directly. For all you future brides, Do not worry too much, as you will have a beautiful and amazing wedding just like we did. We loved everything about our experience at the CAT and would not change a thing.

 

Thanks everyone

 

Maya

Thanks for posting Maya! Everytime I hear about a bride from the Cat, I get more and more excited! Did you have a legal ceremony or did you just do the renewal of the vows and get legally married before you left?

Thanks Josie!!

I am going to have to contact her because I want my wedding day to be the day I am legally married, but i also want a minister to perform the ceremony and for us to be able to speak some of our own vows! I hope we are able to do something like that!!

Oh Maya i was hoping you would come back and tell us all how it was. Like L&C in love says it makes me even more excited and confident i have chosen the right resort.

 

Do you have any price lists or anything that we could look at just to give us an idea of how much extras are.

 

So pleased you had the best day you could wish for :-)

Hi, does anyone know if they have any other beach set-up option other than the white tent??

Hello Everyone

Just to answer some of your guys questions:

So for the extra prices first:

We did not have a legal wedding because if we wanted one we had to wait until very late to reserve our date (as I am sure most of you have experienced this) so we just had the non legal ceremony which I think is called renewal of the vows ($399). Further, we decided that we wanted to spend money of various extras rather than have a legal wedding. (In Chicago it was $10 to get married legaly which we did the day we got back).

So for the extra. The flower center piece, bride bouquest and the flower for the guy comes with the wedding package. Elena will send you a document containing about 12 different flower options to chose from. I went with pink roses and then got 6 extra bouquets in white roses for my bridesmaids. Extra bouquests were $25 each. We also got extra decorative flowers ($50 each) that went on the side of the white tent and were transfered to the private reception.

If you have over 20 people, which we did, attending the ceremony you have to pay extra $12 for each chair over 20 and that covered chairs, champagne and cake I believe. For us we had 47 people minus 20 that's included in the package minus 16 people in the wedding party that were standing in front. So I got extra 10 chairs.

All of the bridesmaids and I got our hair done at the spa. There were two women that worked on 10 of us starting at 9 am and finished by about 2:30. The up-dos were $54 or $56 each, I foget but it was one of the two.

The DJ was $100 and he did a good job. Our DJ did not speak english so I had various people from the wedding party take the microphone and announce things like the wedding dance, parents dance, flower toss etc. It was fun.

The private reception varies by the menu. We did the grill menu which I think was almost $60 per person. It def added up with the private reception, the DJ which I think was overpriced ($450 for 4.5 hours) but he really did keep everyone dancing, flowers, and other extras, but then again I really wanted all of it because we had so many people that made the trip. I was aware of all of prices so I kind of budgeted ahead of time and decided on what I wanted to spend extra money on.

We did the private dinner at the beach $130. I feel that this was money well spent because we finally had some time to ourselves and this was us alone at the end of a very fantastic and busy week.

I think someone asked if they have tent colors other than white. I didn't ask but I would be really really surprised if they did. Everything, the chairs, the tablecloths in the dinner, the balloons on the enterance, were white so I would be surprised if they had all the same stuff in a different color.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Maya

I sent a PM, but I'll ask here in case it didn't go through. What's the renewal ceremony like? Do they allow you to customize it at all? If not, is there a defined script? Thanks in advance!