TheWolferts

My husband and I are headed to the Grand this June 19-24 for our honeymoon and since you guys have probably done a lot of research on the property, I had a couple of questions: - I heard that the grand and the suites have beach parties at night? Has anyone else heard this? - I also heard that the restaurants at the Grand take reservations and that it is a good idea to call before you head down there to make the reservations. Has anyone come across this? - Our TA told us that because we are staying at the Grand, we have access to the suites pools and restaurants too. Is this correct? Thanks and happy planning!

Im glad I am not the only one dealing with post-wedding blues! My husband and I werent able to go on our honeymoon until June19th because of work, so I have been using that as something to look forward too! Also, my husband had to fly out the morning after our wedding back to Ohio (where he works), so I had to fly back to VA by myself... I think that is also contributing to my post wedding "depression." I couldnt bring myself to unpack for about 4 days after I got back because it made me so sad to think about it being over

ElDorado2012- I was wearing wedges for some height and it was terrible walking in them in the sand! I was relieved to get to the portion of the wooden runner. It isn't very long at all so you will have to wade through the sand to get to it though. It is definitely not even as close to as long as in the picture they sent us. We made sure that they made the runner go all the way up to the alter so my fiance and I could stand on it during the ceremony, which I thought in itself was worth the $150, after struggling through the sand. The runner doesnt look exactly like it does in pics and having seen both, I prefer the ones in the pictures they initially sent versus the one they had set up at our ceremony. I do think that it added to the overall decor as well because it gave the chairs more placement and seemed like it completed the set up. Picture they sent (slats running horizontal in one long runner): Picture of the actual runner (sections of about 3 feet placed next to each other to create a walk way):

ElDorado2012- It was 88 degrees the day of our wedding with a "feels like" 94 I believe. The guys were all in light grey, light fabric suits and were carrying around hand towels to wipe themselves down for pics! I think they were a little miserable, but I could tell that my husband was trying not to complain since he knew they all looked great and that I wanted them to wear their jackets I was so sweaty that my dress actually clung to my leg when I walked down the isle, causing my to trip a bit. Our wedding was at 5 and it was significantly cooler at 6 or 6:30. I too was nervous about the music during the ceremony, but it was perfect! I made a "Ceremony" Playlist and renamed the songs for when I wanted them played (i.e. wedding party processional, bride's music, and recessional). Here are some more pics of Toucanes (sorry most are sorta dark and I dont have that many, I will try to look for more): The large chandeliers in Toucanes

My husband and I walked in to "Crazy In Love" by beyonce. It worked out pretty well since I wanted something with a lot of horns in it and my fiance wanted something a little hip-hoppy to get the party started.

I do not recommend anything other than a full updo... it was windy on the beach every day that we were there! My hair was all the way up except for 2 small pieces in the front that we curled, which ended up in my mouth several times during the ceremony adn I kept having to brush them out of my face! My husband even commented on it! LOL

Thanks! Even though I have been done with competitive gymnastics for 4 years now, the perfectionist still lives on! I sent an email to my WC with Lomas mentioning the issues, so I am hoping they attempt to make it right and I am hoping that future brides can benefit from it. Btw, our original wedding date was June 9, 2012 at EDR at Gazebo 55!

I was kinda annoyed by the whole rehearsal ceremony thing. For one, the onsite staff seemed visibly annoyed that I requested a rehearsal and then I think to dissuade us from not having one, gave us rediculous times they were available to hold a rehearsal. Our onsite coordinator came to the site for about 30 minutes, but the person that does the music for the ceremony is not there and the m the minister (if you are using the resort's minister) is not there either. Luckily, a friend of ours married us and between him and my matron of honor, they ran the entire thing. If we wouldnt have had our own minister, I think I would have felt very lost and more nervous about the ceremony. At my cousins wedding at EDR, they requested a catholic priest and were not able to meet with him until they literally walked up to the alter! The father of the bride met with the priest right before the ceremony and I guess the priest had a different version of the bible?, one that apparently was missing a section that the couple specifically wanted read at the ceremony. Also, he was asian and had a very very strong accent, so we could barely understand him. One other issue, since he had never met the couple he started talking about how marriage was like football (i guess insert anything that seems American?) and then talked about the Dallas Cowboys... to a church full of people from DC aka Redksins fans aka Dallas' biggest rival.

Jillsepher- The tables were set up for our white glove cocktail party at the beach location right next to Gazebo 55. They came with the cocktail party though, once we got to resort, they made us pick what color bows we wanted wrapped around the tables to keep the tablecloth down. She gave us either red, blue or green as options and anything else including white, they charged you for... i thought it was very weird that it was the first time we were hearing about it and thought it odd that they were then going to charge us extra for a different color white. Luckily one of our colors was blue so it wasnt a big deal, but I would have been upset if they wanted to charge me for bows that matched my decor.

My dress had a lot of ruching (sp?) on it and was a stretch silk/satin. It was too wrinkled since I made sure nothing was set on top of it, but boy was it heavy to carry through the airport!

We just flew AirTrain from Baltimore direct flight to Cancun. The flight crew we had was completely unhelpful when it came to my dress All planes have at least a captain's closet, which if they dont want to offer that up, fine, but one stewardess actually try to cram my dress into an overhead bin approx. 1 foot wide. I suggest asking the gate attendant if you can board early since you are carrying on your wedding dress. I did this in case I needed to use an overhead bin, which I did. I ended up folding my dress in half and then putting my carry-on bag/purse next to it so that no one else would use the bin and squish my dress. The stewardess that practically took my dress out of my hand to shove in the tiny bin kept saying that I was going to take other customer's overhead space. I said "well my fiance will forgo his overhead space." and promptly sat down. I did get my dress steamed once I got down there (cost about $30), but it really wasnt too wrinkly. I think it just depends on the style and fabric of your dress.

LOL thanks! They said they wouldnt do butter cream because it would melt, so they did fondant and even that was a mushy, melty mess! I thought it tasted really good and was very moist. As for the bar at toucanes, they did not use another bar for the event at our rehearsal or my cousin's rehearsal. One other thing I forgot to note, I had literally begged them to put us in an air conditioned restaurant for our wedding reception and they said they did not allow private events in any of their indoor restaurants... while dining at the Casitas D'Italia, my father mentioned to the matre'd (sp?) that he was here for his daughters wedding and he said "oh the one we just hosted in this restaurant 2 nights ago?" When I asked him about it, he started stuttering and said "oh um it was for a very large wedding, like 40 people" then I said "Ours is 40 people and they wouldnt let me have it here" and he goes "umm it was for a very important guest"... not sure what that was about but I was FUMING! I cannot stand being lied to and it really upset me that EDR did not give us the option of that reception location when I specifically asked and said that we would paid extra money to get it.

Now that I have had some time to digest, I wanted to give a proper review of the wedding events/trip (picture heavy): LOMAS TRAVEL/TRANSPORTATION FROM AIRPORT: On a previous trip to EDR using Lomas, they sent large vans to the airport to pick us up and take us to our destination. This time they did that for the guests we traveled with, but they had a special leather interior, "souped" up navigator with wifi and a dvd player for my fiancé and I's exclusive trip to the resort! We felt like royalty! (Side note tip: DO NOT let anyone inside the terminal help you with your bags!!! 5 guys approached our group and basically ripped our bags out of our hands and wheeled them approximately 30 feet to the Lomas Travel guy, then proceeded to stand on top of us saying "we work for tips" over and over again until we gave them each a dollar. It was very awkward, but they literally wouldn’t go away!) The guests that traveled down with us really lucked out because they were the only people being picked up by Lomas at that particular time. Other guests that arrived later in the week said the trip to the resort took over an hour because Lomas was picking up other guests that were staying at other properties so they stopped at 3 different resorts along the way! CHECK-IN: We were greeted with champagne and the process went fairly smoothly, though Lomas travels insists that you meet with them ASAP to confirm your transportation back to the airport at the end of your stay. Kinda annoying, but whatever, I had champagne so I was happy. I highly recommend bringing a bathing suit and cover up to change into in your carry on or purse because we did not have access to our luggage for a couple of hours, as we arrived around noon and couldn’t get into our room until 2. Friends of ours that did not do this were stuck in jeans waiting for their luggage to get to their rooms! If you are staying in the casitas, which I think most brides and grooms are, they whisk you away from the other guests that are not staying in the casitas section so make sure before you leave the main lobby, you decide on plans for lunch so you know when and where to meet back up. CASITAS: GORGEOUS! Having stayed in the junior suites previously, the casitas are huge, smell better, and have so many wonderful amenities i.e. in & outdoor shower, private beach bed on your balcony, bigger indoor tub, better a/c, and amazing concierge service! We actually got to pick our nightly turndown scent and what pillows we both personally liked! They have 5 options to choose from and you can pick a different one than your fiancé! It was also really nice to have the option to book a reservation even though we couldn’t make it for more than 2 people. We ended up making reservations for later in the night for ourselves, then we told people where we were headed and because it wasn’t during the prime dinner time, we generally got to sit in larger groups (though we found La Isla to be less accommodating). FOOD/BEVERAGE: AMAZING! I don’t recall having one thing I didn’t particularly like and even if I did, it was nice to know I could easily order something else! Our favorite spot for breakfast was either Cocotal or Fuentes. For lunch, I went to the Health Bar and got their chicken wrap I think 5 out of the 7 days we were there. For dinner, our favorite spots were D’Italia Casitas and Kampai, though the wait at Kampei was over an hour and a half and their reservation list was booked solid over 5 days out! Definitely try the drinks of the day which they have displayed at all of the bars. Pic below of the candelight beach dinner dessert: SALON/SPA: We did our couples massage in the sky massage area the morning of our wedding. It was so nice having the sound of the ocean and the breeze. My fiancé is used to intense sports massages so I was afraid he wouldn’t like the Swedish massage, but the first thing he said when we put our robes back on was “That was so amazing! Let’s do it again!†As for the hair and makeup, I suggest doing a trial day. It put my mind at ease just to be able to meet the woman doing my hair and makeup for the big day and also I liked knowing that we wouldn’t be figuring out what I wanted in a time crunch on the day of. Rafa was fantastic! I showed her a couple of pictures of hair styles I liked and said I wasn’t set on any of them, but if she could do something similar, that’d be great! She literally combined all of the aspects of styles I showed her and I couldn’t have been happier! She was very responsive to my makeup preferences and easily and gladly changed anything I wasn’t crazy about. I didn’t want my fiancé to see my actual wedding look so she took my hair down (I felt so bad because it took her a while to do it!) and put it in an entirely different up do (which was a hit with everyone at the rehearsal dinner). The day of the wedding, she took me into a separate bridal suit room at the spa at at first I was upset that I wouldn’t be able to hang out with my BMs while getting ready. I was later very relieved that I got my own area because the main salon was PACKED with BMs from other weddings climbing over top of everyone getting ready. It was pure chaos! My little room was complete with beverages, soothing music, and I think a relaxing aroma therapy scent as well. She started the appointment by giving me a mini-facial and shoulder rub. I don’t know if that is standard for the bride or if she sensed how nervous I was and wanted to get me to relax, but it worked! I actually had hives all over my chest before the appointment and midway through and after some chamomile tea, I actually fell asleep when she was doing my hair! MEETING WITH THE ONSITE WC: Onsite coordinator: Martha Meeting time: Monday evening (We liked that we got to meet with them so early because we could hand off all of our OTB stuff and décor and we didn’t have to take time out from being with our guests) Make sure you print out any papers/email in which your coordinator said they needed to check with the hotel or if you have any last minute changes. Our onsite coordinator Martha did not have our most up to date spreadsheet, so I had to correct a couple of things. About 2 days prior to our departure, I had spoken with our WC Valeria about using a credit we had (due to guests bailing out last minute we had already paid Lomas for their food, so they let us use the credit towards other things). Valeria told us we could use our credit towards getting our wedding day outfits steamed and pressed. The onsite WC told us she would have to check with the hotel but she didn’t think that we could use those services with our credit. Luckily, I had printed that one email out of all of them and handed it over. Martha looked a little upset that I could produce the documentation that Valeria okayed it, so she reluctantly said that we could use the credit. My fiancé then proceeded to give me a fist pump for having that paper with us! LOL Because I am such a planner and knew exactly how I envisioned everything, I also made sure that I printed out pictures of the set up for our place cards, center pieces, ceremony set up, reception table set up etc, so I am not suite sure how many of those items came out looking completely different, but I will get into that below. SEMI-PRIVATE DINNER AT COCOTAL: So we wanted to use this dinner as a wedding party and their dates only (so the traditional rehearsal dinner crew) to hand out the wedding day schedules and just as a little extra group time/thank you to them. Unfortunate, much to Jeff and my trying to keep it between the wedding party, a few other guests showed up… VERY awkward. Since it was the semi-private dinner at Cocotal, we just spoke with the “party crashers†and they were seated pretty close to our group and all was well. It appeared as if we had our own wait staff, which was nice, but it didn’t seem like the kitchen was as in sync as it could have been. We were spread out over 3 tables and the served the table myself and my groom was at last. Which would have been fine if the food would have come out at once. The first table served was completely done eating their main meal before we had even received ours. I called the waiter over to get our dessert served immediately because we had our B&W party to get too, so our table felt a little rushed with our meals unfortunately. BLACK & WHITE PARTY AT THE MARTINI BAR: We wanted to have a welcome cocktail party for all of our guests but didn’t have it in budget to do another private event, so I notified the hotel that a large group would be showing up at the Martini Bar at a certain time and they made sure they had extra staff to accommodate the bar. To make sure our group stood out a little and to make it feel a bit more like an event, we asked all of our guests to wear only black and white. I think people had some fun with the idea and it definitely made us stand out. I also handed out black cocktail napkins with the words “Eat, Drink, and Be Married†in white. REHEARSAL DINNER: We held our rehearsal dinner at 7pm at Tucanes. We brought down blue and white paper lanterns, which we had hung around the edges of the palapas roof. We also didn’t want to spend a lot of money on centerpieces so we brought down white finger starfish and the resort staff scatter a few of these on each table along with 3 votive candles which we rented from the resort. I know other brides said it was pretty breezy and the candles kept blowing out, but our candles were fine and I was actually grateful to have a little more light under the roof since it started to get a little dark. We had the passed Italian family style dinner and I think it may have been a couple people’s favorite meal all week! The wait staff was AMAZING! Any questions they had about when to start serving the politely came up and said “Excuse me Mrs Nicole…†it was so cute! When my fiancé wanted a few more shrimp, they made a fresh batch of grilled shrimp and served them piping hot. One thing that was odd though was that since it’s essentially a pool bar, the bar was actually at pool level so you could swim up, so when ordering drinks on land, you had to tip over the edge of the bar and bend over to get your drink. I could definitely see it being an issue with an intoxicated wedding guest, but luckily we didn’t have any issues. REHEARSAL CEREMONY: I don’t feel like wanting a rehearsal ceremony is a weird thing to request, but I got the opinion from the Lomas onsite staff that it seemed like a big hassle to them. With our rehearsal dinner on Friday evening, I had requested and thought they could do it then, but Martha said the only times she could do a rehearsal at our location was Friday at 1pm, which I could not see me gathering everyone up in the middle of the day to do, or Thursday at 5. So we went with Thursday at 5, but Martha could only stay for 30 minutes and we took about an hour so I wished that she could have stayed longer because I was very nervous that something would go wrong with the timing of walking down the isle or the music since the person that would actually be playing our ipod was not at the rehearsal. CEREMONY: After being so nervous about the ceremony that I broke into hives the morning of our wedding, there ceremony was pretty close to perfect! We spring for the wooden walk way to the alter, which could have been a bit longer as I had to wade through the sand for a good ways to get to the wooden runner, but oh well. It also did not look as pictured. Instead of it looking like a dock with slats running side to side, the slates were running lengthwise to the isle and the whole runner was comprised of 5 pieces of wooden planks lined up next to each other. Not a big deal, just not nearly as pretty as the pictures they show you. I was determined to have a vail and I am glad I did for pics, but it was blowing all over the place coming down the isle. I almost wanted to stop and start over without the vail. Also, I was so hot at this point that my first step onto the wooden walkway from the sand, my dress stuck to my leg and tripped me up a bit Thanks to my dad I did not eat it and I kept a smile on my face so I don’t know if anyone else noticed LOL. Back to the vail, one minute into the ceremony, my vail was hitting my groom in the face so my MOH took it out and tossed it to my mom and then we proceeded haha. The music guy was great! He got all of our songs in order and got the note we passed along to crank up my music because it starts out really softly. We did our own vows and used their mic, which worked pretty well, yet my fiancé still did a “testing testing†which I didn’t think was as funny as he did. setup before decorations hanging corsage veil going crazy!!! yay married! COCKTAIL HOUR: So this is where it stars to go downhill a bit… we had 38 guests plus ourselves and had paid for 40 people to have 2 hours of cocktails and each person to have 7 pieces of appetizers which we had preselected with the white glove cocktail party. Before paying, I spoke with Valeria about having the wedding party’s food set aside, so that we could have some food after our pictures were finished. Valeria assured me this would not be a problem, so we paid for 40 people to have appetizers (there were 13 people taking pictures from our total 40). At our onsite meeting with Martha, I asked her the same thing and she said “oh of course! That will be no problem!†We had spoken with our photographer and she said she would finish our pictures to give us some time to come back and enjoy our happy hour. We finished our pictures with 30 minutes to spare before our reception. While the wedding party was walking back to our cocktail party, Martha stopped us and told me that everyone had already left the cocktail hour and was at the reception already. I thought that seemed odd and told her that was fine, but could we have the food that she had promised us. She said that they had already put everything up so we couldn’t have any food. Then she made us wait at the beach bar, right next to JoJo until she came back to get us. So we were all standing there next to people eating dinner and the bartender kept ignoring us (not sure why) and we were hungry… no bueno. Martha did end up coming back with a small tray of appetizers, but I’d say she only brought maybe 25 pieces of food, not even close the amount we had paid for. While standing there waiting for her to come back, I saw our guests walking towards the reception hall (20-25 minutes after she told me they were all in the reception hall already). Over a week later, this still makes my husband and I very angry that we were essentially not allowed back to our own cocktail party and then paid about $800 for no cocktails and 2 pieces of food. decorations on cocktail party tables our customized napkins! Gazebo55 cocktail hour setup BOUQUETS: I didn’t not like the bouquets, but I didn’t love them. My bouquet was pretty close to the picture (I selected one off the lomas site), but the white Iris seemed almost yellow and plastic-like. The BMs bouquets were not like the picture I sent in other than the fact they used white lilies. The ended up using that cheapy green leafy stuff that you would find in a cheap grocery store bouquet, rather than the ferns I had asked them to use. My alter bouquets were great, though I paid extra to have them use more flowers, than greenery, which is what comes with the $60 per hanging corsage. BMs bouquet My bouquet RECEPTION: I think the reception was when it first hit me that we were having a very small wedding. I didn’t think that our space was that large and it seemed that we filled out Tucanes for our rehearsal, but it just looked very sparse in the Salon Dorado. Our DJ, DJ Doremixx, got all of our wedding party’s songs correct, but ours was a bit messed up. Added to the fact that we didn’t think about what we wanted to do when we walked in, the whole thing was just soooo awkward. Anywho, we cut the cake immediately and that was weird too. I don’t know if its just the fact of cutting cake in front of people, but something was just weird about it. Our cake was carrot cake, very tasty! The design was sorta close to what we had sent them a picture of, but I don’t know that I would spend money on a big cake though. We had given them our cake topper at our onsite meeting and not knowing how tall our cake would be, I asked that the baker cut the cake topper tongs down to whatever height he needed so that the cake topper would not be strangely sticking out of the top… which it was (see pics below). We sat down at our tables that were not arranged as to how Valeria and I discussed nor was it close to the diagram I gave Martha. I had designed the layout so that the head table would be closest to the dance floor. We ended up sitting closest to the front door, furthest from the dance floor. I had given the inspiration picture to Valeria and Martha (I found the centerpiece on the Lomas site) and I thought it was very basic and not too hard to set up… instead of light delicate flowers scattered on the center of the table, they put an inch thick coating of flowers piled up around the entire center of the table. Also, I am not sure if they picked the petals off too soon, but they were all starting to yellow and brown. I did love the blue glasses and our menus we made! Our table set up hanging corsages from ceremony with our lefot over fans and our place cards in the sandbox up close of our menu and place cards Throughout the reception, wedding coordinator staff kept coming up asking me a lot of questions of when we wanted to do things, which was very frustrating because I gave them a spreadsheet with the schedule and I expected someone other than myself to keep track of the time and run things. We also had a few hiccups with the DJ. We had asked him to play Sinatra-esque music during dinner, which he started with, but then Jason Mraz came on. Then Jack Johnson… Don’t get me wrong, I love both of them, but I was not happy. Our best man sensed I wasn’t happy so he ran up to tell the DJ, so the DJ then told him that he did play a Sinatra song… ok, so I guess maybe there was a language barrier issue?? Once we got that switched over I was a much happier bride… until the speeches. We had spoken with the DJ to have the dry fireworks go off as a surprise at the end of our first dance. They accidentally ended up going off in the middle of the best man’s speech… thus spoiling the surprise. Luckily, I guess he had spare so he loaded them back up for our first dance, but the surprise was sorta gone at that point. L During the main dancing, we had asked that he play a mix of top 40s but also sprinkle in some stuff our parents might like. The first half of the reception was all top 40, which I liked but I noticed that our relatvies were sitting down talk, so I asked the DJ to work in a few older songs too. He switched over to playing some older songs… and then never switched back… so mot so much of a mix LOL. Because I had left the scheduling of the event in the hands of the DJ and Martha and left my watch in the room LOL, I had no idea what time it was until the videographer came over and told me his time was up… we hadn’t tossed the bouquet or garter… after I begged him to stay, we immediately ran over to get that in before he left. We opted to not get a large cake, only a small cutting cake, because we selected the dessert plate that gave a small sampling of 3 different desserts. When dessert was served, it was definitely NOT what we had ordered/confirmed with Valeria and the onsite WC. The different dessert would have not been a huge deal if my husband didn’t despise chocolate and the served some large chocolate pudding thing. He was upset that he didn’t even get to eat dessert at his own wedding. We had also put the correct dessert on the menu, so guests knew they incorrect dessert was served. Inspiration cake (we wanted something similar to the middle tier): Actual cake: OVERALL: Obviously, our wedding was about marrying each other and starting our lives together and it was an amazing week/day, but there were so many little things that added up that I think took away from the magic just a little but unfortunately. I am hoping that in time, we will forget about all of the things that didn’t turned out as planned and I am hoping once we get pictures and our video back we can remember the happy things that went better than planned! If I had to pass on any advice to future EDR brides, it would be to not stress out too much. I am a control freak and I think because I had such control over the planning, I didn’t account for anything going wrong and I don’t think you can expect that in a DW, whether it be a language barrier issue or the wedding coordinator staff just being too busy with other weddings. I am the type of person that expects 150% out of everyone and my fiance warned me to lower my expectations a bit, which I am not very good at, but I think has kinda contributed to my being a bit sad that so many things weren’t as I expected. I did get to walk away married to the love of my life and we had a great week with our friends and family. When I think about the entire time we were at EDR, it was an experience of a lifetime. I cant say enough how great it was to see my grandma let lose on the dance floor or friends of ours enjoying such a luxury resort. My husband and I kept commenting all week long how cool it was that we were “making†people treat themselves to such a nice place and great experience because they probably would never had gone to EDR if we wouldn’t have gotten married there. We had a lot of guests telling us it was the best vacation they have ever gone on!

I think the hair was definitely worth the money. We had the makeup in budget, but I dont think it was neccessary since I had her do my makeup about how I typically do my own.

Thanks! We did do an informal Black and White Party at the Martini Bar on Wednesday night. They wouldnt shut down the bar to make it a private event, but we had our guests do the black and white theme so we would at least collectively stand out as a group. I also got cute black cocktail napkins with white writing that said "Eat, Drink and Be Married" and handed those out to guests. I did give the hotel a heads up because I wanted to make sure they had enough bartenders staffing the bar to handle our group and the other hotel guests. They were fine with it be kept reiterating that we couldnt bring food, whcih was fine because we went at 8:30 so everyone was done with dinner.

Thanks! I did a trial at the salon the day before the wedding for hair and makeup. Rafa was great! I showed her a bunch of pics and just asked her to do something similar and I loved what she created! She was also very accomodating if I didnt care for part of it. I had our rehearsal dinner after my hair appts so I asked her if she minded changing my hair a bit so that my fiance wouldnt see, and she gladly gave me a completely different up do! One thing that I was surprised about was that on the day of the wedding, she escorted me awy from the main salon area into a "bridal suite". At first I was a little upset about not being to able to get my hair done next to my BMs, but she let me run over and visit them in the middle of my appointment and I was so relieved that she had me sequestered away! The main salon was PACKED with other BMs for other weddings and it just looked stressful and chaotic! I had my own space, soothing music and chamomile tea (which later switched to champagne)! She gave me a mini facial and shoulder rub at the beginning of the wedding day appt too! I am not sure if that is standard or if she was just trying to be nice because I actually broke out into hives all over my chest the morning of the wedding, so I was clearly stressed out! She did a great job of relaxing me and I dont think I could have relaxed if I was in the main salon area.

People are starting to post some pictures they took of the wedding, so I thought I would share! I cant wait to get our professional pics back!

Thanks guys! I didnt think I was being an irrational bride and i hate that i have negative feelings towards any part of our wedding, so thanks for confirming that my feelings are justified!

Well knowing what I know now, we would not have paid for each guest to participate in the cocktail hour. During our onsite meeting at teh beginning of our stay, I specifically asked our coordinator Martha if they could set aside the cocktail hour food for the guests that were in the wedding party. Meaning, we paid for 40 people to have 7 pieces of appetizers (some of which were the pricier items like lobster and scallops) and she said "oh sure! no problem! the wedding party will get to have their cocktail hour food... WRONG! The wedding party finished their pictures with 30 minutes left of the cocktail party and she refused to let us go back to the cocktail party, claiming that all the guests had left the party and were already at the reception location. She then dropped us off at a restraunt/bar where we were told to wait for her without food and beverage. When I asked her if we could have the food she promised to set aside, she said no, they already packed everything up. I then proceeded to stand in my dress at the bar waiting 10 minutes for a drink and standing next to people eating dinner at JoJos restaruant. I also witnessed all of our guests about 20 minutes later walk passed the bar we were at (they were clearly not in the reception area yet). She managed to come back with a single tray of food, about 20 pieces for 15 people to share. So basically we paid about $900 for 20 people to eat some appetizers, and I heard from some of the guests that the waiters barely came around with food and even some of them only got 2 pieces. What a waste of money! If i were to plan it again, I would subtract the entire wedding party from any cocktail reception order, even if they say you can attend your own cocktail party or that they will bring you food, since I was assured by Valeria and our onsite coordinator that this would happen, and yet it did not.

Again, once I decompress a little, I will right a long review, but we had MAJOR issues with Lomas staff at the resort. Our offsite coordinator, Valeria, was on top of everything, not so much with the onsite staff... part of the reason I have taken so long to write a review was because I am still quite a bit steamed at the issues we had with the Lomas resort staff. Also,we were told that while there might be several weddings at the resort on a given day, they wouldnt have more than one large wedding... well that's BS... we had 40 people at ours and were told it was the largest; however, there were 2 other HUGE weddings with over 60 guests the same night. Perhaps that is why there were so many errors at our reception. I'm hoping that I will eventually be able to not have angry memories of our reception, but right now, thinking about the errors really pisses me off. Need more time to decompress LOL. That being said, the rehearsal dinner and ceremony were PERFECT! Cocktail hour and reception, far from it. Quote: Originally Posted by AllieH yeah, I think you can blame me for that one. I've had to escalate the recent issues I've had with Lomas to my travel agent, who contacted the hotel, and has involved the manager at Lomas. One of my issues is that my WC (Natalia) is giving me answers that are the opposite of what I was told via a chat session (and also contradicts what all of you have shared from your experiences). Needless to say, all is NOT well in the DW planning world right now.

So I just got back last night (without my hubby, he had to fly straight back to work) Mostly everything went fantastic, but there were a couple of big issues at the reception that I will share once I have more time to decompress!

We did take her to the vet and she is already doing much better! I better get back to packing! I cant believe we leave tomorrow morning... so surreal! Quote: Originally Posted by Jillsepher Thank goodness!!!! Did you go to the vet yet?

Im fixed, Im fixed!!!!

Well I think they think they can fix it tomorrow morning by adding a darkening toner. *fingers crossed* The owner was the person that helped me darken it last night from the platinum because he saw tears welling up in my eyes. He called me this morning after I left a tearful message on their machine when I woke up and look in the mirror, so he is squeezing me in tomorrow. At this point, I just want them to fix it and then just think of it as a sunk cost. Rest assured I will refuse to leave the salon tomorrow until my hair is what I want and unfortunately, I don't think if I will be returning.

I asked if they should put in a low light instead and he basically alluded to the fact that the bleach damaged my hair so badly that he doesn't want to put any more dye on it... WTF