antonia321's Playa del Carmen / The Royal Playa del Carmen Wedding review! :)

[Maybride2009]

Antonia, Thank you so much for the review, I found it really helpful.

I am getting married in May which the resort is supposed to sell out. I think March and April will be the same. Can you tell me if the volume of people at the resort was manageable...I am so nervous about it being just packed on the beach and at the resort.

Thank you

[antonia321]

My wedding was in March which is high season and the busiest month so the resort was completely booked. Also, there were some airline issues so some of my guests arrived late and lost their rooms. BUT they ended up get free upgrades! The Royal is a 5 start resort, all my guests were very happy and extremely comfortable. The location of the Royal is so perfect, too. Its not like all the guests stay trapped at the resort, too. They wonder into town during the day, etc.

[Marianna]

Antonia,

 

Thank you so much for the review. It really comes me down..due to the poor communication that the hotel has. Can u tell me how much did the dj charge you and did he bring his own dance floor? Also, i got in contact with the wedding and event company so thank you for their contact as well. Your pictures are beautiful!!!!

[dimax21]

thank you for sharing!

[Shay12]

Very tasteful!!! One of my favorites! I think I have found my resort. I like how you mentioned that there were options for where your guests could stay according to their price limits.

Thanks for the review!

[weddingaway]

Gorgeous pics!  Great review!  Congrats!

[speedy130]

thanks for posting, congrats!

[MichelleMace]

Hi Antonia,

Your wedding was beautiful! I have a few questions. I'm one month out and my WC is being terrible. I'm using La Luna Photographers and I'm just now being told that they can only enter the resort a half hour before the ceremony begins. I'm paying for a 6 hour package which means they start shooting 1 hour before the ceremony starts. Did the Royal give you any problems with entry time? Also, did you have to pay for a meal for the photographers? The contract says that outside vendors who stay for the reception will be included as a guest. I understood that to mean that they would be provided with a meal since I'm already paying $350 for an outside vendor fee. Please help!

 

Thanks,

Michelle

[sierranevada]

Review of Wedding at Royal Playa Del Carmen

1. Check in process/Rooms: We were at first given a room right next to the lobby on top of the tequila bar that was very small and loud. They were able to move us to a better room the next day. Many of our guests switched rooms as well due to various reasons.
2. Room keys: Frequently would not work and needed new ones, very irritating.
3. I think 50 out of the 59 people we had staying at the resort got a stomach bug, including my new husband and I. We switched to a different hotel (the Viceroy) for a mini-honeymoon and immediately felt better.
4. The hotel made simple requests extremely difficult, forcing us to tip hundreds of dollars just to fulfill such requests as basic as (can we move that 4 top to this 4 top, in a restaurant that was completely empty).
5. We spent lots of money at the Royal for our wedding and brought 60 people to the resort, and at no time did we feel that we got any special treatment, or thanks for our business. It was one headache after another for the most part.

Wedding itself:

• Need to preface by saying we had a fantastic wedding- and was truly the best wedding I’ve ever been too (many of our guests agreed). This was due to many factors including the amazing setting, great people, great weather, beautiful ceremony and great reception. While many things did not go as planned, which I will describe below, I did want to say that we felt this wedding was a HUGE success.

Wedding coordinators:

• Maritza & Estela: Were our WC’s prior to 2 weeks before the wedding (Maritza left a few months before and we were transferred to Estela). Both were difficult to work with, not returning emails or phone calls promptly. I needed to escalate a few times. The language barrier was tough and I felt like I could not communicate properly what I wanted, especially since the entire thing was over email. Prices seemed to change daily and the experience was not good. BUT I had read similar blogs from other brides so tried not to get too worried
• Lorena: Was our onsite WC. She was very very sweet, and has a great demeanor- makes you feel like you should not stress and everything will be handled. The only problem was I think she may  have been a bit too passive (ie certain things we asked for were overlooked, more below). Lorena was very pleasant, and did help a lot in certain ways- she put together our name tags for us, and set up the ceremony BEAUTIFULLY with decorations some of which were not ours. The sweetest thing she did was fight for us to get one last song on the beach from the DJ even after our time was up. This meant a LOT to us and the rest of our wedding party.

 

Meeting prior to wedding: This is a very quick 45 minute meeting, where I did not feel we had enough time to go over details. We had 60 guests, 3 meal options, and brought our own decorations so I would have liked it to be a bit less rushed.

Rehearsal: Non-existent… Apparently there was a large fee for having this so we did the rehearsal ourselves… which in all honesty was probably the best way to go.

 

Wedding day:

• Ceremony: Pelicanos Beach
  • Pros:
    • Beautifully decorated just how we imagined
    • Sound quality was good
    • Microphone and speakers were helpful
    • Champagne served as we exited was nice
    • This was the highlight of the wedding for sure
  • Cons:
    • Lorena said that she would meet the guys down on the beach at 5:40 (ceremony start was supposed to be at 6pm), and that she would fetch the girls from my room at 5:50. She told me to gather the bridesmaids and stay in the room until she got us. The guys were down in the heat at 5:30 just to be safe. Lorena was there also and I think maybe just forgot about us, because she did not come get us until 6:15. By this time everyone was in a panic (I was trying to get a hold of her through the hotel but couldn’t, the girls were texting the group asking if we should come down, and the groom was standing up at the altar for 25 minutes thinking I was a runaway bride).
    • Once we finally got down there, the guys had started walking down the aisle twice prematurely and had to be reeled in to start over, despite having given Lorena specific instructions on what song to walk in to.
    • During the ceremony, there were TONS of annoying onlookers (I didn’t notice them but people mentioned this later). Like, full blown thong- wearing banana hammocks standing right behind the altar taking pictures. There is supposed to be security guards preventing this from happening but they did nothing. Luckily we came prepared and had asked a friend prior to the ceremony to please help shoo these people aside if it got to be problematic, and he did a great job. I had also warned the photographer (a vendor from back home in San Francisco) to be careful about angles as to not get these people and she did a great job.
    • There is a microphone that they provide (they never told me there was one, I just happened to see a wedding the day before). I noticed that they did not include a stand- which would have been problematic since our officiant was reading a script off of an ipad. Luckily we were able to request a stand in sufficient time so that this wasn’t an issue, but it would have been had we not been proactive.

 

• Cocktail Hour: Ballroom
  • Pros: There were honestly none- the cocktail hour was a complete embarrassment to us, and nothing went as planned…
  • Cons:
    • We had been debating about having the cocktail hour on the beach or somewhere cooler inside so the guests could have a break from the heat. We decided the hallway outside of the ballroom was pretty and if it could be air conditioned sufficiently it would be a nice, bright location for the cocktail hour. We’d seen the ballroom the day before and hated it, so if the hallway didn’t work out we would have just kept the whole thing on the beach. Lorena told us she would test the AC and let us know one way or another.
    • So, we walk into the cocktail hour to find it not in the hallway, but in the gross ballroom (dark, narrow and overall ugly). This would have been enough of an issue but on top of that:
      • There was no AC- it was hotter in the ballroom than it was outside
      • It was not a stand-up cocktail like we anticipated, instead there were several sit-down tables that were very awkward and not conducive to any type of conversation
      • The hot appetizers were not tray passed as we understood they would be, and due to the strange seating arrangements and buffet style appetizers there was a lot of confusion as to whether or not this was the actual dinner
      • The full-open bar that we paid a TON for, was non-existent. There was a server coming around to 60 people taking drink orders (no bar or bartender), and not everyone was even able to order a drink before it was time to leave for the reception.
      • We had requested a signature cocktail that be passed on trays that wasn’t. Instead they made up a strange shot and passed that around in the beginning.
• Reception: Pelicanos Beach
  • Pros: the reception was very pretty, the set-up was nice, the name cards and centerpieces were how we’d asked for them to be
  • Cons:
    • We had made “shoe check†signs to put in the sand that had been taken down mistakenly for the reception
    • We had requested that our first dance song fade out at a certain part because we had choreographed a dance but didn’t have time to learn the ending. It never faded out and we were left helpless for a full minute…
    • We had requested tiki torches for both the ceremony and reception and there were none
    • We lost so much time at the reception that the whole thing felt like it was only about 90 minutes. This is because we lost time in the beginning due to the late ceremony start and also because it rained for about 20 minutes in the middle of the reception.
    • When it rained there was NO contingency plan.. people just scattered… Lorena was asking my opinion on where we should tell people to go rather than just knowing where to send us. We ended up at Pelicanos where we clearly were bothering diners. We had to do the cake cutting there as well which was really awkward
    • The rain prevented half the people from receiving dessert and I don’t know that anyone received a slice of wedding cake (although they did bring us the cake the next day… but why?)
    • Since we did lose so much time we asked if we could extend the reception so we could at least have some time to dance. They said no because the beach closed, so I asked if we could just move it inside- even to the creepy ballroom. Still a no. We offered to pay the $700 dollars, and just use speakers rather than the DJ, still a no. This was very frustrating to not be able to fix the situation in the middle of the wedding.
    • DJ: All I have heard was good things about Doremixx but we had a very poor experience:
      • We had requested a light up dance floor, and it didn’t come- we got stuck with a wooden one that was all different heights
      • The music was SO loud during dinner that it was actually painful
      • It rained for about 20 minutes in the middle of the reception and the equipment malfunctioned so that even when we came back outside to the dance floor the speakers were blowing and making strange noises and we didn’t get up and running again for about 45 minutes
      • They did not play the last song we requested, and we had to beg for it for about 10 minutes as they packed up their items to go at the end. We finally had to provide the ipod with the song on it so that they would play it (Thank God Lorena allowed this to happen otherwise we would have had very disappointed guests- they were chanting encore)
• Post wedding:
  • We did not receive all of our decorations back that we brought (ie chalkboards, signs, candles, starfish, etc), that we actually did want to re-use since we were doing a follow up ceremony back at home.
  • Front desk service:  We left my wedding dress and an iphone & ipod in a friends room and they checked out early in the morning before we left and left it at the front desk for us. The manager on site refused to give us the items, explaining that “with all due respect, there is no way we could prove the items belonged to usâ€. We had to get our sweet concierge at the Real Club involved and she had to escalate it to an offsite director in order to get our items back. This took about an hour and was completely ridiculous.