NOW Jade wedding review: May 28, 2010

When we arrived, the resort was very accommodating. They already had our names and brought us to the preferred lounge to check in. They upgraded us to one of the preferred suites. Pilar came to greet us and we scheduled a meeting time to discuss the wedding plans. We did a walk through with Pilar for the wedding locations. We actually ended up moving our reception from the poolside restaurant to one of their ballrooms. I definitely felt more relieved after meeting with Pilar.

One really nice thing they were able to do for us was reserving a whole restaurant for our welcome dinner free of charge. They had a nice salad bar and dessert table set up. We were also able to choose the entrees for our guests, they also were able to accommodate our vegetarian and special diet guests. We were even able to pick a specialty drink to serve.The welcome dinner was really great. We had the opportunity to see all of our guests before the wedding and thank them for coming. I give a A+ for that.

The food at the resort is really good, which is surprising for an all inclusive. Most of the time the food is sub par. My sister who has been to Mexico quite a few times said that she had the best food there. The resort was a perfect size as well. We were worried at first because we thought it may be a little cramped and I read reviews that there weren't enough chairs by the pools. We had a 100+ guests and we had no problems getting chairs and we didn't feel cramped at all. Some of our guests hung out at the preferred pool, some by the regular pool, kids pool and others at the beach.

On the wedding night, they decorated our room with a honeymoon sign on our door, chocolate covered strawberries, champagne and rose petals. That was a really nice touch.

Now on to the complaints:

We had given Sandra our budget for the wedding and she said it was definitely not a problem but when we got the quote from Pilar, it was a lot higher than we had expected. I scheduled multiple phone appointments to review the quote and she failed to call. As you know, we had to reach out to the the general manager and director of sales and then I finally heard from her. At the end, the quote was revised to our agreed pricing.

I didn't actually get to see my flowers for the wedding until the day of. Pilar bought them to my room to show them to me. They weren't what I had picked but they turned out nice. I would've liked to see the samples earlier or at least pictures.

After the cocktail hour, no one told my guests where to go. Luckily I showed my parents where the reception was so they had to lead everyone there.

We didn't get to meet our DJ/MC until right before the reception. Pilar told me over the phone that we could schedule a meeting with them but when we arrived she told us it wasn't possible. She did send them my song list and they called me to confirm the songs.

I had included a table for my vendors at the reception but they didn't set up a table for them. I had no idea until my sister asked if I was planning on feeding them. I had to request for them to set up a table.

They forgot to serve our wedding cake to the guests! So no one got to eat our $600 cake! This is the one thing I'm really upset about.

Overall I would say the wedding turned out fine but it was quite unorganized. I'm not sure if that's common with destination weddings. I just had to overlook the mishaps and enjoy the moment.

Hope this info will be helpful to you and the other brides. Let me know if you need any additional info.

Feel free to share my review with the other brides. You can also give them my email address as well if they have any specific questions. The forum was super helpful to me when I was planning the wedding so I would be happy to give back. I used Fernando Fuentes for my makeup and hair and he did a wonderful job. I also hired our videographer from Mexico, Christian Pinto and his team from Mediamorfosis and they were AWESOME. I cannot praise them enough. I will share the video with you when we get it.

We posted pictures of the ceremony (from the resort photographer) on our wedding website. He was included with the wedding package and were surprised how nice the pictures turned out. We actually flew in our own photographer from NYC but if we knew the photographer at the resort was that good we would've just used him.