rodent

I think it helps to avoid giving your photographer a long list. You wouldn't want them to be so resticted. if you hire someone creative it can work out better just to let them be inspired. We did have a couple must haves though. I wanted a group picture & one of my BDW starfish. The ROR photographer is Michael. If you search the forum you'll see lots of samples of his work. Something that I did last minute & wish I would have thought out before was putting all the accessories I'd want photographed in a sack for my photographer. I had a program & some of our random wedding things. This way all that stuff was together for her to take pictures of it. If I would have planned this in advance I would have brought an invitation and some other wedding things.

Quote: Originally Posted by JHarwood2Be I'm a little nervous about dealing with Lomas for our wedding. I think the first thing is to be aware and unfortunately by your experiences I might know what kind of red flags to look for. It's unfortunate that we have to worry about this when planning our weddings. I didn't want to worry people. but, i think just knowing what to be aware of should help things go smoother. We had no idea the shuttle thing would be so complicated. it's not like they ruined our trip. I just trusted the guy at first & we probably could have gotten things taken care of better if we were not so nice to him & just demanded what we wanted done. We should have just said, "these are our guests, put them on this shuttle & give us a written confirmation" and not even listened to his sales pitch of us riding a catameran into the sunset after our wedding. I also should have pressed the issue more when we saw a guest wasn't on the list. We just didn't know not to trust the guy yet. If we knew we couldn't trust him we would have been much more persistant. This was our only bad experience though. Everyone else we delt with in Mexico was wonderful. So I don't want to paint a bad picture of what to expect.

Quote: Originally Posted by Mandy Is it starting to become clearer why we had to start a "Boycott EDR and Karisma" thread? Try planning your entire wedding through Lomas! that is sort of what I was thinking. Just a huge company with deceptive practices. It's not fun to be on vacation feeling like everyone wants to scam you.

Quote: Originally Posted by Mandy Ok, I'm going to need the e-mail addresses for your moms. Don't worry about why. are you going to try to get all of moms to join the forum and talk about their sex lives? my mom doesn't have internet during the summer.

so i just googled lomas to try to understand what exactly they are. they are bigger than I thought & part owners of EDR.

Quote: Originally Posted by pryzeless Morgan, Is this lomas guy the lomas rep at your hotel? yeah, there were several of them. The first one you encounter is right when you leave the airport. They tell you where to go for your van. Then you talk to several lomas people trying to get on the right van. it was pretty messy. the driver was nice. at our hotel their were 2 lomas reps that were in the lobby bar in the day time. These are the guys that gave us the most problems. From our experience & what other's have told me the entire Lomas company is run poorly. So it's not like we just had one bad rep. I don't know if peopole who didn't book with funjet interact with them. There were other people there doing a similar job for different companies.

oops never mind. i see mine is already moved & the link works.

yay! We all need to remember to fix the links in our siggys once they get moved.

Quote: Originally Posted by Mandy Yeah, ask her about the beach beds at the resort! On second thought, don't!! ha ha!! it was their anniversary & they were serenaded by a looney toon vest wearing sax player. honestly, can you really blame them?

http://bestdestinationwedding.com/forum/t9132 here it is

there is a thread about wedding dates that might help. i think this is a great idea. http://bestdestinationwedding.com/forum/t18001 there is another I can't find...

I didn't have time earlier to actually share advice. the lomas guys are the ones that you meet at the airport to get a van ride to the hotel. warn your guests to make a pit stop before getting on the van because the ride can take a while. You sit on the van waiting for a while until it's full. Then you make multiple stops along the way so it can take a while. This really isn't a complaint, just a heads up. There is a restroom right outside the airport at this little hut concession stand. You get a ticket when before you get on the van. Your driver will take it, but make sure you get it back. They just pass it around to each other & you have to keep track of who has it so you get it back. Our driver didn't give it to us & we got scolded by the lomas guy at the hotel. he acted like we couldn't get a van ride back to the airport. He got us really worried about making sure our guests had theirs so we met them all when they got off the van to confirm. That should not have been our job. We met with the guy the first day to "confirm all of our guests were taken care of." I put that in quotes because that was not his priority. We saw that one guest wasn't on his list. This should have let him know there was a problem, but he blew it off. Turns out the guy was booked at the wrong hotel & it all could have been resolved that day if the lomas guy actually cared to help us. Instead he spent the whole time pushing trips on us that we didn't want to take. We didn't tell him we had a trip booked through sinal tours/ mayan landscape. I was worried he would somehow cancel our trip. When we returned from the trip with Sinal, the lomas guy was mad we didn't book through him. Maybe this was the reason why he lied to us the night before our wedding saying that the guy who was booked at a different hotel owed a "$1,000 no show fee." He just made that up to upset us. He also told 4 of our guests they needed to cancel their trip with captain rick's for deep sea fishing because the weather would be bad. good thing those guys didn't listen. We should have been able to arrange all of our guests shuttles the day we had the meeting with him. Most of our guests were flying out at the same time so it would have made sense to put them on the same van. Instead they had to each meet with him 2-3 times and ended up splitting them amongst 5 vans. He tried to split up my mom & aunt after my aunt had paid extra for a flight that got her on the same shuttle as my mom. He accused them of lying to him about the confimation he had given them the day before. We tried to get a cab to go to Paamul for snorkeling. A few days prior the lomas guy told us you can't snorkel at Paamul. Complete lie. It was a wonderful place. He tried to block us from getting a cab so we would pay twice as much for a van through him. We had to wait until he went back upstairs to get a cab. Also, he would schedule appointments with guests & then not show up. So my tips are: 1. Don't book your excursions through Lomas. Book them through a better service. I really liked Sinal Tours/ Mayan landscape. http://bestdestinationwedding.com/forum/t23934 You can book deep sea fishing directly though captain rick's or someone similar. if you want to go to xcaret or xelha you can just buy your tickets online or when you get there & take a cab or collectivo. It's usually cheaper to book everything yourself & cut out the middle man. 2. don't tell the lomas guy what types of excursions you have planned. try not to tell anyone at the hotel. I thought the bellhop was just making conversation with us when we arrived. He asked what we had planned & I told him about the trip to coba. he asked who we were using & I told him Sinal. Then he lied & said they were banned from the hotel. So I learned to just keep our plans a secret. 3. get everything in writting. do not trust a verbal agreement. 4. try to get all your guests booked on a shuttle when you have your first meeting with the guy so they don't have to individually meet with him. I felt bad that our guests were having to deal with all of this. It should have been so simple. I don't want to get anyone worried that this is going to be a disaster. It didn't ruin our trip. But, if I would have known to expect this we could have made things a lot smoother.

Quote: Originally Posted by Mandy Ok, I'm out then. I have a Mac. But let me know what you hear about Lomas. http://bestdestinationwedding.com/fo...391#post448906

The email address is [email protected] We had a terrible experience with Lomas. Mandy & her group had a similar experience so I told her I'd give her the contact info once I found it. I thought I'd share incase someone else has a complaint. I'm normally not a big complainer, but these guys were so unethical. One guy lied & told us we owed a $1000 fee that he had just made up. He was rude to all of our guests. Lomas was the only bad part of our vacation. My experience with Lomas 9 years ago was great. I had heard things had gotten bad, but I couldn't believe what an impact they had on our vacation. I will avoid Funjet just to avoid Lomas until things change.

We leave each other cute little notes all the time. then we save them in a box. we are like high schoolers with a note box.

Quote: Originally Posted by Mandy Did you get anywhere with them when you called? I haven't called yet. I'll probably call while I walk to my car when i leave work. I might be working late tonight though. Quote: Originally Posted by Mandy Morgan, what did you use to put your siggy together again? lumapix fotofusion. you can get a free download on their website to try it. it's $40 for the basic version. i use it to make photobooks & all sorts of projects. it's really nice software. sarah started a thread about how to use it. it's only for PCs though.

wow it sounds like a romantic comedy. Looks like a beautiful wedding though. That is too cool that Jason was your photographer. Hey Jason, when do we get to see pictures? CONGRATS!!

Quote: Originally Posted by MelanieS Yes, we had one booked through another company, but cancelled and booked through Lomas. Big mistake. I guess we should advise all brides to steer far away from any deep-sea fishing trip and Lomas in particular. There are lots of other fun side trips they can take; also we should advise them to book the trips themselves. It's more work and a bit of a risk, but no more than using Lomas. I plan on starting up a lomas thread. I agree it's better to book your own stuff. it was a lot cheaper & we got great service. Quote: Originally Posted by Tlseege Every time I see your siggy Morgan I think about how beautiful it is... so I just wanted to tell you that. your siggy is beautiful. You look so happy to have married the man of your dreams. thanks! I am really happy I love being married. I leave him little "i love my husband" notes each day. wonder how long it will take until he gets tired of it?

when I saw you were back I came hunting for your pictures. you looked beautiful. I hope you can figure out the video. I'm happy to help, but I've never done it before. i'll be trying to figure it out next week when i have mine.

Quote: Originally Posted by MelanieS And don't forget about the ill-fated deep-sea fishing trip that we booked through Lomas. That was a nightmare in itself and of course they refused to refund any money. oh i didn't know you went through lomas for that. lomas tried to cancel my groups fishing trip to rebook it. if it makes you feel better, captain rick's wasn't awesome. they were very good & did a great job, but there were a lot of boats fighting for the same fish. our group didn't catch anything until they convinced them to go farther out. they spent the first 2 hours trolling.

Quote: Originally Posted by ashrose Hey morgan... here's the blog to stalk: Kaylee Eylander Photography Hee hee... I was going to use her up here (in Seattle pre-DW days) and she was so quick to respond to me and so willing to chat about doing a DW... so far, I have nothing but good things to say about her. Now...just need to get the date actually booked at the resort... then officially book Kaylee and we are good to go! ha ha I found it already. I googled "extreme bridal seattle" did you see she is doing a free extreme bridal session? You don't have to be married. Just get a long white dress & trash it. Might be a good way to work with her before the wedding.

we had some times change, but they were all better times. I was so scared of this happening, but luckily it didn't. The best you can do is get a good TA & travel insurance. I'm really sorry you are dealing with this. Canceled flights was my biggest fear for our wedding.

yeah, your best bet would be a trade in at the same jewelry store. I've never known someone to get a good price reselling. Anyone buying a used ring wants it for a steal. Consignment takes forever & selling just the stone gets you a lot less than you paid too. i really love your ring. What about a really, really thin metal band?

one of my friends has a micro pave band that is so tiny. it pairs well with her ering. it's really beautiful.