RollerBride

For those that have been to the resort: After our rehersal dinner, we want all of our guests to gather at one of the bars for a "Meet & Greet". Any suggestions on what bar would be good for about 30-34 people? I was going to do the Lobby Bar, but I figureed I would ask here for some insight. Thanks!

Our Wedding is August 4th. We sent out our Invitations in February (i think...maybe it was March). We had already told all our close friends and family about the wedding, though so they could plan/save accordingly. We asked everyone to RSVP by May 1st. We waited a few extra days for late RSVP and emailed friends and family that hadn't replied just to make sure they were not coming. Then we emailed Yamina and gave her the fianl head count by the 2nd week of May. Hope this helped.

We chose a preferred club room. We chose it because it is our honeymoon too, so we wanted to splurge. Some of the perks: seperate check-in, automatic honeymoon packge included (if you book for 7+night-you can read about the honeymoon package online), upgrade liquor options, internet, etc. Also, we booked with a travel agent and we sent all of our guests to her too. She told us we would be getting a discount based on the number of rooms we got booked. That is another reason we opted for preferred club-we knew we would get a discount...no matter how much or how little. We have 36 guests which came out to 12 rooms. God bless out TA, because we are paying super discounted rate for a 10 night stay in a prefered club suite and we got to upgrade my parents room also!! hope this helps.

I JUST made the decision to go with the DJ. I have to let Yamina know now, we had previously booked the sound system. The cost of the sound system for 4 hours (ceremony and reception), after tex is $800. The cost for the sound system (ceremony) and the DJ for 3 hours, after tax is $1200. We don't really have room in our budget to be making such changes, but all in all I feel like it will save us the piece of mind. I won't have to prepare playlists and instruct someone how and when to cue them up. For anyone who has used the resort DJs, do they have microphones? Will they announce your wedding party? announce the dances? announce cake cutting? Will they cater to your style of music? Are they pretty flexible? Do I just provide them with a timeline of events throughout the recption with approximate times?

Sorry, to clarify: I meant how long did you picture session take?

WOW! Your picture came out AMAZING!! you look so perfect! Do you have the resort do your hair and make-up? Did you use the resort photographers? How long did they take? How come no one is crying in their pictures!?!?! i'm ready to cry LOOKING at your pictures!! we went to the courthouse and did a 5 min legal wedding 2 weeks ago before I went to work and i was a cry-baby mess, so I can only assume i'm going to be worse with everyone watching me in Mexico.

I 'm doing the Love package. I tried to swap our 36 pictures for the Mariachi Trio (then upgrade to a bigger photo package), but Yamina said no....womp womp. Just wanted to let you all know in case anyone else thought of doing that also. So I think I will add 2 extra hours of photography (1 hour of us getting ready & 1 hour at the reception) and also add the Marachi Trio to our Cocktail Hour.

Our travel agent put something in our contract saying that we would be responsible for paying for unbooked rooms. My fiance asked her to change the contract so that we would not be responsbile for unbooked rooms, and she did!

Is anyone doing the Mariachi Trio? Our friends were married at Dreams Tulum last summer and they had a Mariachi Trio. They were so awesome and fun, my fiance loved it and wants to add them! I'm not too sure WHEN to add them. We want them for the cocktail hour, but we will miss some of our cocktail hour due to pictures, right?Wwe want to be able to enjoy them. Also, we chose to have our cocktail hour indoors (for the AC) at Desires and I think a Mariachi Trio would be too much indoors. They were perfect outside last year. Any advice? If our ceremony is on time and we get right to the pictures, we should be able to enjoy our cocktail hour, right?

Have you received your koozies yet? How is the quality? We ordered cheap ones from Oriental trading and they are awful. I've decided to order new ones. I'm mad i wasted the money, but the Oriental trading koozies are embarrassing, i don't know what we were thinking when we picked them. I don't even know what to do with them! haha

I'm sorry, I know i'm posting alot today but i'm bored at work I get so wrapped in this wedding stuff i lose my common sense! I bartended for years (still do, for the wedding fund) and i've worked plenty of private event ranging from 20-500people. Every event I work, the wait staff gets an automatic gratuity. It's added to the bill, just like it is for our wedding packages. Sure, some hosts left and extra gratuity and thats nice but it's not very common. I plan on tipping for my hair, make-up, nails and photos (if there is not a gratuity included). I'd like to get my TA and WC some sort of gift.

I'm not too sure. I haven't given it much thought actually, but now i'm really concerned about it. I found this link from The Knot: http://wedding.theknot.com/wedding-planning/wedding-budget/articles/wedding-vendor-tipping-cheat-sheet.aspx?MsdVisit=1 And this thread from this message board: http://www.bestdestinationwedding.com/t/26560/tipping-etiquette Hope this helps.

I found this on tripadvisor today....because i stalk the reviews for Dreams.... We had our wedding with 40 of our family and friends at this resort and I cannot say enough good things about it!! A huge surprise for us was we stayed for 2 weeks for free since we had that many people book! Our travel agent said that was the best discount she had seen from a resort for a wedding group! We have done many all-inclusive stays at 4 or 5 star resorts before and this was by far our best trip. The resort itself is beautiful and kept up very well. The service was beyond all expectations. There was service around the pool and on the beach. The food was exceptional and it was wonderful that you didn't have to make any reservations for the restaurants. The staff in general was plentiful and amazing. We saw many incidents of staff members going above and beyond their duties. I would recommend that you ask to have your rooms close by if you are in a big group and because we were spread all over the resort. We had emailed our wedding coordinator back and forth before we arrived, but basically planned our wedding the second day we arrived. Yamina was our wedding coordinator and did a great job! They picked up my dress and my husbands clothes and steamed them for us the day before the wedding and then dropped them off a few hours later. We got married on the beach (the gazebo was nice, but the beach was a little more private). Our flowers were beautiful. Our marriage officiant spoke perfect English and was very good. Everything went flawlessly. I would recommend getting the sound system for the ceremony so that your guests can hear everything, plus then you can have music playing when you walk up the aisle (which they also timed perfectly). We had a buffet dinner on the beach and it was delicious! The staff set up a full bar and we had servers. They would even take a lady's plate when she was finished filling her plate at the buffet and walk her back to her table. They cut up and served our wedding cake for us as well. We had minimal decorations on the beach (just centerpieces and flags) and it was absolutely gorgeous. We hired and DJ for two hours and had a dance floor set up. The dance floor lit up with different colours which was really neat and we didn't even tell the DJ what to play and it was awesome. The dance floor was packed for the full two hours. I do not have one single complaint about anything on our wedding day. They were so organized it was amazing. I should mention I saw at least two weddings everyday so we knew we picked a great hotel to get married at. When we got back to our room after the wedding the staff had put rose petals throughout the room and on the bed and left a bottle of champagne and fruit and a lovely letter from the resort. We stayed for a second week without our guests and still had a great time. They do turndown service at the hotel every night and everyone has robes and slippers in their room. The rooms with the plunge pools are very nice. We stayed in an oceanview preferred club room on the third floor and it was very nice. We will definitely return to this resort again and will stay at another Dreams everywhere else!!! Please tip the staff when you go because they are amazing!!!! I still cannot believe how well everything went!

We wanted to have our cocktail hour indoors so our guests could get in the AC for an hour before the reception. Our wedding is the beginning of August so we are anticipating it to still be pretty hot at 5:00pm. Yamina has told me that our indoor options are the ballroom or the sportsbar. Does anyone know where I can find pictures of these locations....prefereably pictures of them decorated for an event? if not, I will ask her to send some pics and i'll share them here as well. Thanks

i know that this is pretty off topic of the resort, but if anyone could send me a link or give me suggestions on what my mom should wear to the wedding, i would really appreciate it. is there a topic on this board already? My wedding isnt formal, but it's certainly not casual. My mom and even some of my guests are REALLY unsure of how to dress! I'm having a hard time telling people what i want them to wear because i really don't care what they wear, as long as they look nice. I just keep telling them, "it's a wedding! dress for a wedding on the beach!" Thanks!

Thanks! Well, we are keeping it a secret that we are legally married. My fiance thinks that people will get mad if they know we are already married and that they won't want to come to Mexico anymore. So, I'm not changing my name or anything until after our Ceremony in Mexico, so it won't affect my ID or passport.

We are doing our Symbolic Ceremony on August 4th. We just got leagally married in CA this past Friday!

oh man, I was rying to keep our under that but it definately didn't work, and I feel like we aren't even do many add-ons....how did you manage to save so much money on everything? I'm coming from the West Coast, so my flights were probably more than flights from NJ....

* we have 37 people coming...ooops

I have under 100 days left too!! EEE!! i can't wait to park my butt in the sun! We were going to do a formal family (rehersal) dinner because our families haven't met and it is important to us, but we do not really want to add another couple hundred dollars to our budget for it. My plan is to have the immediate family meet at one of the restaurants right when they open and hope for the best. There should be about 15-20 of us. Then we are having the rest of our guests meet at a bar around 8:00pm so EVERYONE can mingle and meet each other- we have about 27 people coming. Regarding your other question, we are doing a 3 hour reception. If we want to keep the party going, we will go to one of the bars. I went to a wedding at Dreams Tulum last summer, and that is exactly what we did and it was great! Kate

Ah, everything looks perfect! I can't wait! I just have one question, did you have to add the bamboo arch/chuppah to your package? or was it included for weddings on the beach?

I opted to have my wedding on the beach, not at the gazbeo. I was just wandering if the bamboo arch that i've sen in pictures is an extra charge. The bamboo is different from the gazebo.

Thanks! I've emailed Yamina to use it. I'll have to see if she winds up charging me.

For everyone getting married on the beach, ar you all using the bamboo arch? I really haden't given it much thought until i looked through other bride's pictures and i think it looks great. It looks like it's $380, so i'd have justify that cost into the budget somehow. Has anyone found any pictures of wedding without the arch or anything at all? I think at thihs point, for me it's more a want than a need.....

I was wondering if anyone had specific pictures of the 2 locations also. I had originally booked our recption for the pool terrace but then someone posted a piturec on here of what i THOUGHT was the pool terrance but it was the deck. I've changed our recption to the pool deck now, but i just want to make sure I have it right. if you have any pics, can you email them to me at [email protected] (i'm unable to open attachments on the board) many thanks!