Whew....all that planning and our wedding was ABSOLUTELY PERFECT! Here is my review, as promised.

Resort - The resort is absoluteloy beautiful! It is well-kept, clean and is just simply gorgeous! To me, it was the perfect size....not huge, but definitely not too small. Loved it! It has two pools....the party pool and the preferred pool. The preferred pool isn't only for preferred guests, it basically is just more chill and doesn't allow kids. They are serious about the no kids too....I saw them politely ask several kids to go to the other pool. Others have reviewed that the lounge chairs and cabanas are unfairly reserved at the crack of dawn, and this is true. If you want one, get there by 7am and claim it as yours...trust me, it's worth it! The party pool is larger than the preferred pool w/ fun music and activities organized by the staff. They also have events on the beach...sand volleyball, horseshoe tournament, etc. You will get a list of all daily events and restaurant opening and closings each evening in your room. Only negatives I can even think of is that a lot of our guests, including me, got some pretty severe bug bites. We don't remember there being a lot of bugs, but all agree that we got bit while sleeping. The other negative is that if the concrete throughout the resort gets wet it is ridiculously slippery, so be careful!

Check-in - Check-in was seamless for us. Upon arrival, they took our bags and escorted us to the Preferred Lounge. The Preferred Lounge is only for preferred members. It has games, snacks, drinks, and computers available to members throughout the day and night. Very convenient and a nice place to grab/make your own drink on the way to the pool! They handled our check-in in the lounge and then they escorted us to our room. It was beautiful.....overlooked the preferred pool and had a jacuzzi tub on the balcony.

Arrival Gifts - We chose to not haul a ton of gifts for our guests to Mexico. We felt like people didn't really need any junk w/ our names on it and certainly wouldn't want to haul it back with them, so we opted to have a bottle of champaigne in each of our guests room when they arrived accompanied by a handwritten note from us. This was way more our style than doing koozies, etc. Typically the resort charges $4 for each delivery, but since we bought the champaigne from the resort, they waived that fee. We paid $20/bottle and they let us use resort cash for eight of the bottles. MOST of our guests received their champaigne and note, but a couple did not. Once I complained about it, they did receive it. Not the end of the world.

Restaurants - Most of the restaurants are excellent! Pay attention to the daily itineray you receive in your room because all of the restaurants are not open each night. Our favorites were the italian, french and mexican. Spice, the asian restaurant was good too, but typical of any hibachi restaurant in town. Cin-Cin, the "modern" restaurant was our least favorite....definitely wish we would have skipped that one!  The buffet is good, and Castaways (off the party pool) is good too, especially if you are sick of buffet food. The servers are all amazing and most appreciative of tips! We never had to wait for a table more than 10-15 minutes. Not a big deal at all.

Cocktails - There is absolutely no shortage of alcohol at the resort and the staff is eager to help you get a drink! We never had to wait more than a minute or two for drinks. The only beer at the resort is Dos Equis...period. Drinks are strong and plentiful, if that's your thing. Aresnio in the lobby bar is fantastic!

Dance Club - The club is fun....it's the sports bar that turns into a disco/dance club at 10pm. Lots of fun and that's seemingly where all the partyers end up. It closes at either 1 or 2am.

NOW - LET'S TALK ABOUT WEDDING STUFF!!!

Wedding Coordinators/Contract/Initial Meeting

We were supposed to meet w/ Ana the day we arrived (the Tuesday before our Friday wedding), but it was POURING all day long and she was handling moving two weddings around that she had that and we pushed it until the next morning. The was totally fine with us...it gave us a chance to check the resort out and just explore. Our guests didn't begin arriving until Noon the following day, so as long as the meeting was done by then, we were fine with that. We met with Ana the next morning and she was SOOOO on top of it! Our contract was consistent with what we had discussed and matched what she had sent me in advance of our arrival. I'm a BIT OCD so I had all of our wedding items separated and labeled w/ photos, etc. She seemed almost a little TOO on top of it, but once you realize how many weddings they do a week, you know they really are on top of it.

She mentioned that she wanted to upgrade our room and offered to show it to us. I thought our initial room was already amazing and quite honestly, I wasn't super excited about moving because we had already unpacked and organized all our stuff.....that is until I saw the room. Seriously....I can't imagine a nicer room in the whole resort. We walked in and inside the front door is a view of the balcony overlooking the ocean with a huge jacuzzi tub on the balcony! To the right was a formal living and dining room with more doors to the balcony. To the left was a full bathroom, then the bedroom w/ a sitting area with another balcony off that! Through the bedroom was the master bathroom and walk-in closet. The bathroom had another jacuzzi tub and see thru showe all lined w/ windows overlooking the ocean. SERIOUSLY.....if Jay Z visited this resort, this is the room he would stay in! Ana asked me not to  mention our upgrade to any of the other brides because while they try to upgrade most brides, we were upgraded to that room because of its availability AND because we had such a large group (51 people). Needless to say....we moved. :) Only thing bad about it was that it was on the 4th floor and the elevator was broke until 2 days before we left. Oh well.....I ate and drank so much, I didn't mind the extra exercise. We got a ton of it too because everyone wanted to see our room. We actually took our first sighting photos on the balcony.

One thing to note about the wedding coordinators before I move on is that Ana's father died unexpectedly and Pilar had to take over our wedding. I found this out late Thursday afternoon right before our welcome reception.....awesome! NOT! Pilar and I made an appointment for the next morning to go through my wedding items.

Welcome Reception - We had a non-private welcome reception the night before our wedding. They sectioned off a corner of the lobby bar with a private event sign, had chips, salsa and guac for us as well as servers. I'm not sure if they were our private servers or not, but it kindof seemed like it. If someone needed a drink, the bar was right there, so it wasn't really necessary. We met at 7pm forr our reception. After some haggling w/ Ana before we arrived, she agreed to put tables together for us after our welcome reception in the buffet for our welcome dinner. Once we arrived though, and realized how many great restaurants there are, we released those tables and just let our guests eat wherever they wanted. We all grouped up and went to eat and then met later to party. It worked really well. I just didn't feel good about forcing our guests to eat at a specific place two nights out of their vacation.

Rehearsal - We had our rehearsal at Noon the day of our wedding. This worked perfectly! We didn't want to cut into any other days of our wedding party's vacation, and we knew they were all staying around the resort on the wedding day. Seriously, it worked very well!

Hair and Make-up - I did a practice run on both the day we arrived. I'm so glad I did! It just gave me a comfort level and one less thing to worry about on the wedding day. I took a couple of photos of hairstyles that I liked with me and Angela nailed it. She was great and spot on with what I was hoping for.

Flowers - I sent photos in advance of what I wanted for flowers.....I used the resort florist and was pleased. My bridesmaid and I were the only ones to have real flowers. My mom's friend is a retired florist and she made the boutineers and mothers corsages from a photo I gave her before we left. I wasn't about to pay a stupid amount of money for something that was going to get trashed anyway. Several people argued about whether they were real or not. :) We got the eternity package and they let me switch out the corsage and boutineers for fresh flowers for my one female bridesmaid (my other one was my brother). Pilar brought me both bouquets to look at to the wedding rehearsal....I made slight changes at that time and they ended up looking exactly like I wanted. I brought the peacock feathers and turquoise ribbon with me.

Wedding - Our wedding was at 4pm at the Pergola. It was draped with white draping and had a white aisle runner, which were both included in our eternity package. I brought chair bows with me because I wasn't going to pay them $5 each to use theirs. I think I bought them for less than $1 each online. They ironed and put them on the chairs for free (they moved them to our reception chairs for dinner). The wedding was everything I dreamed of! We had live music....one of my bff's sang me in and one of our guests played the guitar...it was amazing! They did provide us two microphones for the wedding so our minister had one and the singer had one. Two complaints - the sun was in my eyes the entire time we were facing each other....luckily it was only during our vows. The other thing is a pro and a con....we didn't hire a videographer, but there was one there.....apparently Ana threw that in for us, which is really nice! Only problem is, he was in the way of our photographer during the whole ceremony! GRRRRR! He was standing in the center of the aisle during our announcement and first kiss and she had to be off to the side. Had I known he was going to be there, I could have made everyone aware that I wanted the photographer to have 1st view of everything. A small thing, and some of you may actually have preferred to have the videographer front and center, but I was annoyed. He continued to be an annoyance post-wedding and throughout our picture taking. He didn't stay through the cocktail reception or dinner.

Cocktail Reception - we had our cocktail reception immediately following the wedding at the Blue Beach Bar. Perfect location in our opinion! The staff met the wedding party w/ glasses of champaigne as well as each of our guests as they arrived from the wedding. Since we brought our own photographer and minister, Ana let us exchange that for a live caribbean trio. We were taking photos most of the time they were playing, but our guests seem to enjoy it. Our guests also raved about the hors d'oeuvres.  Before we moved to dinner, Pilar came to get us and showed us how the reception was set up to make sure it is how we wanted. It was absoloutely perfect! Only minor thing that could have been an issue is that Ana had told me to fit all 51 of our guests, that the rectangle tables had to be butted up against each other, but when we looked at it, the tables were separate. We had made our seating chart based off of them not being separated, so a couple of couples were actually at different tables. We changed it and it was fine.

Wedding Dinner/Reception/Festival Terrace - we chose the festival terrace. We definitely wanted something open air and private, so it was a great choice for us....a little warm, but I still wouldn't change the location. Plus, it gave me a good reason to change into a short wedding dress I brought to wear for the reception! :) The configuration of the room gave me a little anxiety during my planning, given that it was long and narrow, but it actually worked out well! Depending on the size of your wedding, long rectangle tables may be your only option (rounds wouldn't have worked for us). We did assigned seating and had place cards and menus at each place setting. We had our guests note which meal they wanted on their RSVP cards, so we were able to tell the resort who wanted what in advance. The food was amazing.....everyone raved! The wait staff was amazing and there was definitely no shortage of drinks....whew! Only negatives for the location was the heat and that there is a step up into the buffet that could potentially be a tripping hazard, but we didn't have any issues.

Our dinner/reception timeline:

Announcement of couple - DJ did this

First dance

Cake cutting

Grace

Dinner

Toasts

Dj & Dancing

** we wanted all the formal stuff like the first dance and cake cutting out of the way before we got too late in the reception.

Reception Decorations - We brought table runners, vases w/ flowers and floating candles, vases & peacock feathers and paper lanterns. I priced doing the table decorations myself and then I had the resort price it and there was a $120 difference PER TABLE! So, while I didn't want to haul all the vases (we had help from friends and family) I refused to pay that much per table. Glad I went that route and just gave detailed photos of what I wanted because they nailed it.

Cake - I emailed Ana photos of what I wanted the cake to look like and it looked great! Funny though....we had a monogrammed "L" as a cake topper and it came out w/ the L backwards...too funny! Our photographer noticed and switched it around. I'm not a big cake person, but I heard it was OK.

DJ - I went back and forth on whether I wanted to get a DJ or not. I thought we could just do the cocktail reception and dinner and then go to the dance club. I'm so glad I didn't go that route and hired a DJ instead. I don't know who Ana hired, but he was amazing. Super super fun! We wanted it to be a party atmosphere and not a dance w/ tons of slow songs and he did the job! We hired him for 2 hours, but he stayed 3 hours.

I think that's about it! I've included the links to our photos, which should help visualize any part of the wedding/resort you have questions about. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to email me at [email protected]

There are photos of everything I've discussed in the links below. Enjoy!

Here is a link to our entire wedding gallery.

http://jaclynmariephoto.smugmug.com/KimDustin

Here is a link to our photographers blog w/ fewer photos

http://jaclynmariephoto.com/blog/2011/11/21/destination-wedding-kim-and-dustin-at-now-jade-in-cancun-mexico/

Have fun and enjoy your planning and Wedding!

Kim