I stalked this forum daily while I was planning my wedding as it was such an incredible source of information. I didn’t actually post anything throughout the planning process, but now that my wedding is over I want to share my experiences and hopefully some future brides will find it helpful.  So here I go!

Resort

The Resort itself was comparable to the other ones I’ve stayed at in Cuba and Jamaica.  The rooms were nice and clean.  The food was good and there were a lot of options.  My only complaint is they are very stingy with the bottled water. 

A note for any future brides who are considering buying wedding favours in Jamaica: there is a free shuttle bus that leaves the resort every hour to go to the Rose Hall Shops.We did this one day and were able to buy almost 40 bottles of jerk sauce and marinade at one of the stores there to use as our favours.There are a bunch of souvenir stores there, so it is a good place to buy favours if you are looking to buy them in Jamaica.

Meeting with Wedding Coordinator

We met with the wedding coordinator the day after we arrived.The meeting was fairly short.We just went over all the details we had sent her previously.She was very agreeable and laid back - said “no problem” to all of our requests.We left feeling confident that everything would be taken care of.We had also brought a lot of decorations with us that we dropped off with the coordinators in the days leading up to the wedding.We explained exactly how all the decorations were to be set up and even left them with pictures of how we wanted the tables set up at the wedding.Again, everything was “no problem”.

Welcome Dinner/Bonfire

We planned a welcome dinner at the Japanese restaurant for our 2^nd night in Jamaica.This was a lot of fun for our group and I recommend this as a good group activity.After dinner, we had booked a beach bonfire with a bar for our group as well.We had brought sky lanterns that we set off on the beach during the bonfire and everyone had a blast doing this.If you have room in your suitcases for sky lanterns then I definitely recommend bringing some!It was a great group activity that had everyone laughing and cheering together.We had also brought all the ingredients for smores, which people cooked on the fire and that was fun as well.We had brought an ipod dock which we set up at the bonfire with a pre-planned play list, which was perfect for creating a party vibe.We booked the international bar for the bonfire.The resort was very accommodating throughout the bonfire.We had booked it for 1 hour starting at 8:30, but we kept tipping them and I think they kept the bar open for 2 hours for us.Even then the bartender packed up really, really slowly and he continued to serve drinks as he packed up.They didn’t put the fire out until after 11:00 and they didn’t take the lights down until after 12:00.A group of us stayed out until they took the lights down because we were having so much fun hanging out and dancing on the beach!

Wedding Day

Overall, the wedding went well, although we did have a few problems with the resort that day (I will explain below).We actually had the ceremony offsite at a private beach booked through Tropical Weddings Jamaica and I would recommend this to anyone looking for a more private beach wedding experience, but the rest of the wedding took place at the resort.My two bridesmaids and I all had our hair done at the salon at the Suites.We all had up-dos, which looked similar, but were all a bit different.They did a good job with our hair!My bridesmaids had a big problem with pins falling out throughout the day, but my hair stayed in place really well.I also had my make-up done and they did a good job with that as well.They did my lips way too bold, so I wiped that off, and I fixed the eye liner a bit, but other than that it looked pretty good.I had ordered orchids for my hair to be delivered to the salon for my appointment, but the orchids didn’t arrive in time so they said they would deliver them the hotel room.We were so busy getting dressed and ready to go that we forgot all about the orchids until a few minutes before we were going to leave.At that point one of my bridesmaids called the coordinators and I think they did some yelling and the orchids arrived while were in the lobby about to leave to go to the private beach.My bridesmaid literally grabbed the orchids out of the woman’s hand as she walked into the lobby and then started pinning them in hair.I found out later than my fiancé had sent me flowers that morning with a card saying how excited he was to see me, but the flowers arrived late too so I didn’t even see them until that night.The resort refused to take any responsibility for the issues with the flowers since they are from a 3^rd party company and I guess it wasn’t too big of a deal, but it definitely would have been nice if the flowers had arrived earlier.

As I mentioned, we had our ceremony at a private beach offsite that we booked through Tropical Weddings Jamaica.We also did 1 hour of photos at the aqueduct ruins after the ceremony.This is a beautiful location for photos if you want something a bit different for your pictures. I can’t wait to see our photographer’s pictures! We also booked a van with a company called Reggae Tours to take us to the different locations throughout the day.This company was fantastic to work with! They were reliable and right on time the day of the wedding and I would definitely recommend them.

After the ceremony, we booked a cocktail hour in the Jammin’ Music Bar at the resort before dinner.This turned out to be a great spot for a private cocktail hour and it was a good size for the 35 people we had there.There is a pool table in the bar and some people played pool while we were there.They also have a sound system in the bar already, so we made a playlist ahead of time and were able to just plug in our ipod.We had ordered the Menu A appetizers, which were set out on a table and were very good.

Unfortunately, this is where we started to have some issues with the resort.We had been told ahead of time that there was a microphone in the Jammin’ Music Bar that we could use to do speeches during cocktail hour.But it turned out the cord for the microphone was only 1 foot long so that anyone using it had to stand in the separate DJ booth and couldn’t be seen by anyone in the bar.The idea of doing speeches when no one could see the speaker seemed a bit weird!So we talked to the manager about getting a longer microphone cord (which we know they have at the resort because we saw them throughout the week), but the manager never came back.We waited awhile for him to return with the longer cord, but eventually we had to start the speeches.Our speakers ended up standing in the room with everyone and yelling to be heard (since they couldn’t use the microphone), which was definitely not ideal.

Also, at this time I had asked one my bridesmaid’s husbands to walk over to Uncle Tony’s and make sure that they had set up all our reception decorations correctly (we had brought centerpieces, table runners, seating chart, table name cards, etc.).So he headed over there about 20 minutes before 7pm (which is when our dinner was scheduled to start) and discovered that they hadn’t set up any of our stuff.They had completely forgotten all of it!!!!!So he ended up having to scramble to get all our decorations from the wedding coordinator’s office and set it all up.Thank goodness I had asked him to check!We ended up staying in the Music Bar longer and started dinner a bit late because of this.

The food at Uncle Tony’s was really good.I heard many people raving about how good the steak was!We didn’t have enough people for the private reception, so there were other people in the restaurant, but that didn’t bother us too much.One strange thing was that I had sent them everyone’s meal selection in advance as I had been told do to, but for some reason the waiters came around and asked everyone what they wanted to eat.I guess the meal selections I sent never made it to the right people, although I know the wedding coordinator had the list because we had looked at it together when we met with her.Another complaint I have is that the waiters didn’t mention to anyone that the appetizers were buffet-style, so everyone was sitting and waiting after they ordered when they could have been getting their appetizers.I was getting really antsy about the time throughout dinner since we started a bit late and then it took awhile for the waiters to take the orders and everyone to get their appetizers.We had scheduled dinner from 7 – 8:30, but we did end up going over due to the delays.We ended up sorting of rushing people out after dinner since had booked an after dinner reception on the Bob Marley Terrace from 8:30 – 10:30.I think we ended up starting the reception around 9. I wasn’t too happy about this since 2 hours is not long enough for a reception in my opinion and the fact that we started late meant we had even less time.However, I think they did let us go a bit later than 10:30 in order to make up for this.

We were very happy with the Bob Marley Terrace as the location for our reception.The terrace does open into a main hallway, but we didn’t really notice and we felt like we had our own private location.They hung up the paper lanterns I had brought (although I do have a minor complaint about this as well:I had brought 24 lanterns and they only hung up 12 of them.This was annoying because I had asked the coordinator in advance and she had told me that there was room for 30 lanterns).We had brought throwies to light the lanterns, but they ended up lighting them with bulbs and wiring them.They also had our cake set up on the terrace and we cut it there and people helped themselves throughout the reception.We had ordered 3 tiers: 1 chocolate, 1 vanilla and 1 strawberry cheesecake.I didn’t get a chance to try the chocolate, but I thought the vanilla was so-so and the strawberry cheesecake was quite good.We had booked the sound system (but no DJ) for the 2 hour reception.My husband is a musician and has high standards when it comes to sound and he was extremely unhappy with the speaker they provided for us.The bass wasn’t working properly on the speaker, so the sound wasn’t that good.However, we were still able to use our ipod and the playlist we had made for dancing.

Overall, we were happy with the resort and we had a fantastic time at our wedding.Many of our guests have told us they had a great time and thought the wedding went perfectly.My only advise to future brides would be that if you have a lot of decorations or any other details that you want executed a certain way then be prepared to do a bit of micro-managing while you are down there to make sure everything turns out the way you want it to.Having said that, I would definitely recommend this resort to any future brides!