El Dorado Royale (EDR) Brides - POST HERE!

[Oxana Sh]

Thank you, Amanda. I heard that BBQ is delicious from many brides. However, we have just 18 guests... For BBQ the resort requires minimum 30.
 

Nicole, if I remember right, you had Italian family style dinner. This is the second type of family dinner they offer. I am interested in a regular family style. My WC told me it includes many different things. 

 

REGULAR FAMILY STYLE DINNER MENU

Salads:

Cucumber salad with honey and tequila.

Crab salad with spinach

Shrimp salad with pineapple

Potato salad with cured ham

"Caprese"mozzarella cheese and tomato salad

 

Side orders:

Baked potatoes

Corn with butter

Mixed vegetables

 

Main courses:

Shrimp skewers

Salmon fillet

Beef tenderloin steak

Roasted meat "arrachera style"

New York steak

Chicken breast

BBQ ribs

Beef and chicken skewers

Lobster tail

 

Desserts:

Rompope (egg nog) custard

Fruit tartlet

White and dark chocolate cake

Lime tartlet

Cheesecake

Fried banana with condensed milk

[Oxana Sh]

Originally Posted by TheWolferts 

 

 

We used DJ Doremixx and he brought an assistant. We only incurred the $800 outside vendor fee. I dont think EDR can charge a per person fee, as its one vendor coming in to provide service. If they do tack on extra, I would definitely fight the charge!

 

I was shocked when my WC told me that $800 is only for 1 person...I thought it is for one outside vendor. So if I would order flowers from an outside vendor, I would need to pay for all delivery guys as well?

[TheWolferts]

Originally Posted by Oxana Sh 

 

 

I was shocked when my WC told me that $800 is only for 1 person...I thought it is for one outside vendor. So if I would order flowers from an outside vendor, I would need to pay for all delivery guys as well?

 

Talk to your WC again and you might mention that you have been informed by several previous brides that the outside vendor fee covers the vendor company, not a per person fee. You can even use my name specifically if you want. I know that other brides had other issues of WC either not being well-informed or trying to "work one over" on new brides, so they brought up other brides' experiences and pricing quotes and were then able to negotiate the price down. We had an outside DJ that brought his assistance and there was no additional $800 charge.

[LKocelko]

We have our AHR coming up on August 3rd - what a headache. BLAH! The stress of wedding planning is back - except this time we aren't rewarded with a trip to Mexico at the end

[AllieH]

yuck to more wedding stress and no return trip to Mexico!!!!

 

are you wearing the same dress..? at least it's a good excuse to get all dressed up again!

Originally Posted by LKocelko 

We have our AHR coming up on August 3rd - what a headache. BLAH! The stress of wedding planning is back - except this time we aren't rewarded with a trip to Mexico at the end

[LKocelko]

I'm not, I got a cute little white summer dress. It's brunch at this restaurant by here, so I would've felt ridiculous waltzing in in my gown at 11:00 am haha I will bring it, though, so everyone can see it. Since we only had immediate family at ours (20 people) we needed to do something to celebrate with all our families and friends.

[Jess Ashley KC]

I am getting married January 18^th at the El Dorado Royale and am looking for advice on photographers. I look at the approved vendors and don’t know how you are supposed to choose. Has anyone worked with any of these? Any good or bad reviews of them? Thanks

[Feb2013]

Originally Posted by LKocelko 

 

We have our AHR coming up on August 3rd - what a headache. BLAH! The stress of wedding planning is back - except this time we aren't rewarded with a trip to Mexico at the end

I feel your pain we are finally done with all wedding stuff we had to have AHR in NJ (my Husband's home town) and MO (where I am from and live)! I think it was more of a pain b/c I planned my wedding for Mexico the additional AHR were our mothers wanting! Finally feel like I can just enjoy being married now. But I am already planning our trip back for our 1 year! LOL!

[jnitschke]

ok, so we just got some more photos from Sarani.  I LOVE THEM!!!! No joke, picking just a few to print is going to be hard, right now I just want about 100 around the house.  She gave us 472 photos in the 3 1/2 hours we were with her.  Seeing these, I wish I had just spent the entire budget on getting her photos the whole day.  Best money hands down.  Plus, she sent along an 11x14" padded print as a thank you gift!  Bonus!  These are obviously just a few, I put about 100 on facebook.  So if anyone really cares to see more here's a link to the album https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.453210464774940.1073741835.100002579708923&type=1&l=8d44bf64b5. 

 

One of my favorites, a bonus of getting married at EDR is that the location gives you locations to shoot at that other brides would have to do a TTD shoot to get, love my beach and on the rocks shots.

 

 

I'm including this picture because I think it's a good shot of my hair and make up, both of which were done in the salon.  If anyone is debating on using the salon and would like to see some more pictures of what it looked like, I have a few other really great shots that I can PM you.

These pictures were so much harder to take than they look.  Sarani says "Spin her around, no really your dress will look great spinning."... and flop in my wedges all over the sand, falling all over the place... but she was right, they are some of my favorite photos.

To give you an idea of how much I sank down in the sand, here's a picture of our feet on the same beach as above... I'm wearing 3in wedges.

 

[jnitschke]

 

Here are a few photos of my ceremony set up, reception set up, and flowers to accompany my review from last month. 

I'll include a little explanation to go along with them to help future brides with their planning.

This is a picture of my gazebo set up.  I was and still am extremely unhappy with the way this looked. 

Gazebo 55 is very beautiful and secluded from the rest of the resort.  I think it needs very little to dress it up. 

I recommend not doing too much to this location, and letting the natural beauty come through.

• We used 5 organza 50"x10yd sheers.  I think for the way I wanted them to drape this was not a good fabric choice.  I also they they did a just plain lousy job of hanging them, the charge for this set up was $200.  I also don't like the organza because the ends look ratty.  If I had them going to the ground and not flapping in the air up high, they probably would have looked better.  We saw near by a gazebo with just plain white sheers and it looked elegant and gorgeous.  Originally I though plain sheers would look.. well plain, but not so in person.  Again, I tried to hard to dress the place up.
• For future brides, I would ask the wedding coordinator at what time your gazebo will be set up and have someone who knows you well go and check it out.  maybe even take a photo of it to show you, perhaps have your wedding assistant accompany them.  You will be too busy with getting ready to go yourself, but there is no reason why someone else can't go and scope it out.  So that if you are dissatisfied you can have them change it.  I would have given anything to have that done.  I hate the way this looks and every picture from a distance, it always the first thing I think when I see it.  That makes me a bit upset, seeing as the even made me very happy.

 

.... you should also know that for all of my LOMAS complaints I have not been reimbursed anything and Lomas has been ignoring all communication from me.  If you have a Lomas complaint from your wedding I suggest you get it taken care of before you leave the resort.....

 

• You can also see my chair hangers flapping in the wind.  They were just ribbon and peacock feathers.  While they looked pretty hanging on chairs in my house, they were too light to hang well in the wind.  Using the starfish or something heavy like a shell, like other hangers I've seen, would probably help them hang better.  Also, the wide white ribbon catches the wind very easily. 
• My runner as you can see wouldn't lay flat and was like this for my entire walk down the aisle, something to hold it down probably would have helped this issue.  It was so windy the any flower petals on the runner would have long blown away... and our bubbles were completely lost in the wind. 
• The sand as you can see was raked, but not packed.  It was completely torn up by the time I got to walking down the aisle.  The runner did not help at all with walking across the sand.  I highly recommend wearing flats for your walk down the aisle.

Tucanes... and our reception set up.

Now, while this set up was a great use of the space for such a small group, it was quiet and no one could talk to one another... making the dinner kind of boring... when we had our rehearsal dinner in La Isla we had one long table for the 13 of us and it was very friendly.  We had a great time.  I recommend not spreading your group out for the sake of the look of the venue and your table.  I was too hung up on the aesthetics, although I did love the way it looked.

For my tables, I brought my own table cloths, runners, tea lights, and votives.  They set up 3 vases with flower petals and floating candles (which did not stay lit the entire night). 

I paid $180 for the centerpieces on the 3 tables, and an additional $50 for set up of my items. 

My total set up costs were $250 for both locations, these also included luminaries along the walk way and the pool, which sadly I don't have a good photograph of.

sweetheart table for the two of us, and a clear vase to hold my bouquet, which was wholly unnecessary because my flowers had basically fallen apart completely by this point in the night.   Also, the table cloth here was a round table cloth.  The wedding planner wasn't sure it would work on the sweetheart table size, but I think it worked just fine.

*****************

Speaking of flowers, here are some pics of my bouquet and my MOH's, you can see the weird evergreen filler, the painted orchids (Not true blue dendrobiums, DO NOT order the blue dendrobium orchids), the peacock feathers that I never asked for, and the awful plastic flower holders.

 

$300 for my bouquet, $60 for my MOH's...again I never received any kind of refund for this.

Also, here's a photo that Sarani took of the flowers that had fallen off my bouquet during the ceremony. 

If you compare the size of my bouquet in the rock picture you'll see that it ended up the same size as my MOH by the time we made it to the reception.

 

Now.. I know this was a lot of complaining... but all in all I loved having my wedding at EDR and I love my husband... which I think you can tell in my photographs, which I loved.  This is just a little helpful wisdom being passed on, so that other brides don't have the same mistakes as me.