Dreams Cancun Wedding April 2010--POOR EXPERIENCE!!

[Gwen]

Attention April/May Dreams Cancun Brides!!!!!

 

You may be in for a surprise if you have an upcoming wedding at this resort. We have just returned from our wedding on Apr 10. Let us start by saying our friends and family would all consider us very laid back people and very low maintenance.

We picked this wedding site a year ago, and even traveled to Dreams 6 months ago to check the locale out. We specifically asked at that time if there would be and construction/changes planned. Answer was no. When we arrived at the resort, we were upgraded to a towers room. However, the room overlooked the disastrous construction site where our special day was to take place. Our gazebo had been torn down!! Yes, the beautiful gazebo that is still up on the website is now gone. There was a huge blue tarp covering the now construction zone known as our wedding site(click on file below for wonderful picture). In addition, the beautiful surrounding area had changed. There were several hundred yards of huge concrete blocks with rebar sticking out, forming a new jetty that was quite unnatural appearing. The private adjacent beach where our reception was to be held was completely redone and built up so that it was not quite so private and communicated with the other resorts. Again, no planned changes as they told us. We immediately had a meeting with several managers (bride in tears of course). When I asked why they had withheld all of this information, they claimed it had all been done only 5 days prior. This was later found to be a complete lie as the local photographer who is at the resort 3-4 days weekly told me positively that it had been 25-26 days for the gazebo, much longer for the new jetty. We demanded that other arrangements be made as the bride would be wearing high heels and a beach wedding was not what we had been planning for a year. We ultimately decided to have our wedding at a sister resort (Now Resort) which was about a 45 min drive south. They provided a charter bus to transport our 50 guests. The wedding was nice there, although not what we had planned for so long and not what we were planning to bring our family/friends from another country to see. We proceeded to have meetings every other day or so with the wedding planner (Cecilia who was pretty good) and her boss (Rafael who was not so honest about timing of gazebo construction). As one can imagine, this made for a pretty stressful week prior to our wedding. One of the meetings was the day of the wedding, and finally another several days after. At each meeting was what we considered an insulting small discount on our botched wedding. In the meantime as our guests arrived, almost every guest was told at the desk that there were no rooms available for them. Some of them were upgraded after putting up a fuss in order to get a room. Many of them were not so fortunate and had to be put up in other hotels. The grooms own mother was not even staying at Dreams on our wedding day!

We finally had our room relocated away from the construction site reminder and were placed back near the dolphins. In the end, we paid a portion of our initial wedding bill. We were not offered a return voucher stay in the future even though we inquired about it several times. Overall the experience was quite traumatic. We felt they were intentionally deceitful before we arrived, then lied to our faces directly, and ultimately gave very little to zero effort to attempt to make up for it or try to make us feel happy or special in any way. It also rained the last 3 days of our trip causing several leaks in our room as well as others across the resort resulting in the only breakfast locale (world cafe) to be closed. We do not plan a trip back at this point, nor do we recommend to others for vacation or especially for a wedding. We are happy we are married but quite happy that our experience at Dreams Cancun is over. On a positive note, the food was overall pretty good across the resort. Also, the photographer and videographer were awesome and provided a great video and over 600 great pictures. But if you are expecting more than pictures and food for that special day of your life, you may rethink your options as it’s not too late.

 

 

cancunppt.ppt

[TLC4Rock]

Wow, that's not a pretty picture. There is another post on here talking about the lack of communication to brides with the construction.

 

It's sad to hear your wedding was disrupted by this! I'm sure other brides would appreciate your update and details.

[vdaybride]

WOW! So sorry that you had to deal with this! Congrats on being a Mrs. though

[KelZavs20]

Thanks again for posting the picture and giving the rest of us the heads up..even though its NOT the kind of news i like to hear about this resort. and i feel terrible that this happened to you.

[JanineA]

WOW! So sorry to hear about. I hope you will also post this in the Mexico section. Congrats on becoming a newlywed and glad that you were at least happy with the photography and food. I hope some of the memories were at least salvageable.

[Thomasjsgirl]

I'm so sorry to hear you had such a horrible experience with Dreams. Many of us have been watching the thread where this issue was first raised, always hopeful that Dreams would have an alternate and equally appealling alternative. Obviously not, and obviously this reflects badly on the whole Dreams chain. They should have had a new gazebo built before beginning to tear down the old one. I'm glad that you were able to salvage your day though so you have some happy memories at least.

[roxmysockz]

So sorry to hear this - the picture is shocking and I just cant believe they would do that without telling future weddings this was going on!! x

[tiffaneyh]

Wow. That sounds awful. At least at the end of the day you were married to the man you love.