Redheadedone

My wedding is in just over 2 weeks now and ironically I am now the one who is causing the poor communication with the resort. Never buy a house just before your wedding! I am way too busy! My communication from Scarlet did pick up closer to the wedding and she has been very good about following up with me. At this point I am just going to trust her and that everything will turn out beautiful and roll with it! I am so sorry to hear that people are getting caught with the resort closing over the dates they had wanted to have their wedding. I literally had nightmares that the new management company was going to shut the place down for maintenance over my wedding when I went through a long period of not hearing from them! It really is the most beautiful resort by far that we visited in Punta Cana and I'm very glad that we are getting married there. I think I would have also been happy with the Paridisus Palma Real but they were a little more of a "wedding factory" and I really like the quaint, more personal touch that Sanctuary had. My advice would be to stay away from Secrets Royal Beach and Now Punta Cana. They were horrible!! I hear Zoetry is nice, too. I had a coworker whose son honeymooned there. I will let everyone know how it turns out!

I think a big part of our issues have also been them changing POCs and not telling us. I just found out today that Angela who had been handling our group bookings is now gone and Scarlet is the new wedding coordinator. I got a few emails from Scarlet today so she cleared up some stuff for me.

Yes, that does seem to be the case - the closer you get to the wedding the more I hear they actually respond. I have to say though having my wedding be less than 3 months out and going 3+ weeks with no response is a bit nerve racking. I'd like to at least know that the new management company hasn't completely changed my package options, or they aren't going to tell me "oh, it's 2 weeks notice, all the DJ's are booked" or something like that. My future mother in law has also been trying for weeks and can't get her room confirmed which is another source of frustration. I'm trying to be patient - but it's getting harder and harder. It would be helpful if they'd just send me an email saying "it's still a bit earlier than normal for us to be working out the details or your wedding. If you want to send a list that we can look over to make sure nothing will be a problem go ahead and do that and, unless something will be an issue, we'll start working hard on your details XX days out." Fingers crossed everything works out. I really really loved this resort so I'd hate for something about the wedding to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Looks like they are booking through August now - at least rooms - I'm not sure about weddings. It's still a pain to get our guests booked (our wedding is beginning of june) but at least they appear to be getting the reservations done eventually. [email protected] is a valid email for them. They just seem to be REALLY slow to respond now. Since we booked our wedding back in July 2012 we've dealt with 3 wedding coordinators and are on the 2nd sales manager. I emailed the current (I hope!) wedding coordinator 2 weeks ago and still haven't heard back from her. Just sent a follow up today. Hopefully I will hear back soon.

Unfortunately, I am still having issues with reservations. I may have settled on a new price with that that's in line with the current pricing, but without the group code working it has been very difficult to make reservations. After the debacle that went down earlier I was told to direct all of my reservations to the resort managers personal secretary. Even doing that, it's been almost a week since we put in requests with no responses. I find it very disappointing that it takes that long to make a reservation......in fact, I never even got a "Thanks, I'll get right on that" response.....very frustrating. I don't anticipate that they would ever sell out - but if I end up with guests who can't make reservations I am going to be furious.

By the way, I should disclose, I finally did get a hold of someone at the resort that was able to help me and seem to have gotten everything worked out at this point. Fingers crossed everything will go smoothly from here!

Carori - I have no idea what the rates would have been during the timeframe of your wedding. My wedding isn't until June, which is the off season, so I am guessing they would be quite different. I'd keep checking the website. It seems to pop up and down all the time.

Well, that didn't go so well. The reply they gave me was just to send me a copy of the contract I had with the other management company and tell me that they will honor it - and would be happy to add additional rooms at the contract rate. Hello!? The whole point of asking about revising/canceling the contract was that I wasn't going to have my guests pay 150% more than their new published rates. And you ask me to add MORE rooms at the increased rate? I almost punched my computer screen. I don't know how much more I can take of their place.

I am still having a lot of issues communicating with them but it has gotten slightly better. My guests still can't book rooms through our group reservation and now, since they are excepting reservations again online, it makes me nervous. At least when no one could book I didn't have to worry about them running out of rooms. Now that it's only my group who can't book (our code doesn't work) we are at a disadvantage. I only blocked rooms for 3 days but most people plan on coming a week so the other 4 days are subject to availability. Also, the resort has lowered their prices drastically to try to increase occupancy so my group rate is now higher then any rate you can book online. I'm trying to renegotiate that with them. They say they are hoping to get my group code working again by tomorrow. Fingers crossed!!

That's basically my biggest fear, that they are shutting down the resort for some time (whether is be for renovations, to sell it, etc) and they just aren't telling me because they are trying to work out some legal issues before dropping the bomb on me. I have emailed the wedding POC 4 times now with no response, tried the Facebook page, [email protected] email, etc. I did get a canned response saying "we received your email and will get back to you shortly" from the "info" email - but they didn't answer my questions. I don't see how it can be so hard to give me a straight answer. We have probably a dozen people who already have plane tickets to the wedding. Some were able to book rooms before they took the system down and have confirmation codes, others were told by the resort that they would take down their information and let them know when the system was back up for bookings. I definitely feel like we are being lied to. I have no idea what will happen if they somehow cancel our wedding.......

Now that they've changed management companies have you had any problems communicating with them? They have basically cut off all communications with me.

I have had about zero luck communicating with the new management company. I was reassured right after the management change not to worry, that their level of service, etc would remain the same and everything would be taken care of for the wedding. We are now on our 3rd wedding coordinator and she is no longer responding to emails so I am guessing that she doesn't work there anymore either. They are also not taking reservations past April 15th, so none of our guests are able to book their rooms. I have asked numerous times what's going on with this and have gotten no response. I saw a posting to their Facebook page asking about construction in January, and they response from Sanctuary was "No, we have no major construction going on during the winter season from January-April 15th." I am starting to worry that the new management company has some major construction plans for the summer and they aren't taking reservations cause they might not know what parts or the resort they are closing - or horror of horrors, if they are just shutting the place down to do work on it. It makes me very nervous that no one is telling me what's going on because they don't know what to do with our wedding and are somehow going to screw us over. We are under contract with them and they already have deposits from us for both our room contract and wedding contract so they better be honored!

We are getting married at the Sanctuary in June 2013 . We visited in June 2012 to check it out and it was beautiful. It took us a long time to get our contract worked out but eventually it all got signed. They were very quick to respond at first but I think they have been going through some personnel changes recently. I haven't tried communicating with them much lately (once we got our contract worked out we still had 10 months to plan) so we will see how it goes when we pick the talks back up. -Michelle

Carori, I am getting married there in June 2013. Your rates are comparable to what I got. I'm sure lots of things effect the prices......types of rooms, all inclusive options, etc.