****tulum Brides 2014****

[omontes]

@sdh8, would you mind sharing Camilo Nu's contact details?  Thank you for the helpful info!  Piedra Escondida looks beautiful! 

 

Also, I saw many brides post about Makeup Pros and it looks like Fernando only does makeup.  Does anyone have any recommendations for hair?  I am planning to have a friend do my makeup, but will need a hair stylist.  Thank you!!!

 

Hola sandall7!

 

I do recommend to MVP, Melissa and her team are really talented, if you can see the reviews are very positive and the brides have been more than satisfied!

 

http://www.bestdestinationwedding.com/reviews/p/21591-mvp-hair-and-makeup-artistry/

 

http://www.OctavioMontes.com

 

I hope this has been helpful.

 

Have a nice day, Greetings!   

[sdh8]

@sandall7--I will send you a PM!

 

I'm planning to get some colorful Mexican markets totes for my bridesmaids (like these...http://www.shoplatitude.com/red-frida-market-tote.html).  Does anyone know about how much they cost at the markets in Tulum?  I'm assuming they might be cheaper at markets in Playa?

Edited April 16, 2014 by sdh8

[sandall7]

Does anyone know Nora Grey (hair stylist) contact details? 

[yesenia0507]

Hello! I'm new to this (first post ever)! Any recent brides that got married in Ak'iin Tulum?! I'm just wondering about bar & transportation? My wedding is in 4 weeks, May 28th - eeeeek!! I think I have everything else set up, however I feel totally lost and overwhelmed at times!!

 

Any suggestions or your opinion on your big day helps tremendously!

 

Thanks!

[yesenia0507]

Hi @@sandall7 -- so I'm getting married in just about a month at Be Tulum and am just finalizing a lot of our vendors now.  So the good news is, you have a bit of time

 

Our hotel coordinator also recommended Planner 1 and they were very nice and responsive, just a little out of our budget.  I also wrote a similar post in a panic a few weeks ago and got several good recommendations, including a wedding planner - Joyce - who often posts here.

 

Here's who we are using for the following services.  Of course, I'll know more after May 10th, but for now, so far so good!

 

- Florist - Cherry Blossom (found them based on recommendations here.  Sandra has been really nice and flexible)

- Make up - The Make Up Pros (recommended by hotel and brides who were also married there)

- Hair - same

- DJ Equipment Rental (we have friends who are DJs) - Not sure if they do rentals, but we're using PlugIn AudioVisual.  We also got in touch with a few other DJs, based on the recommendations in this forum and all seemed pretty good/responsive.

- Videographer - Blue Lens Caribe (recommended by our hotel)

- Furniture Rental - Royal Table Cancun (referral from Cherry Blossom - the biggest savings we found for the ceremony)

 

Hope that helps a bit and good luck!

 

Hello HoyaBeth!! Congrats on your upcoming wedding!! I'm getting married in May also!! I had a questions, who are you using for transportation?

[HoyaBeth]

Hello HoyaBeth!! Congrats on your upcoming wedding!! I'm getting married in May also!! I had a questions, who are you using for transportation?

I think we are going to use USA Transfers. We hit a few other quotes but they were much more expensive.

[HoyaBeth]

@sandall7--I will send you a PM!

 

I'm planning to get some colorful Mexican markets totes for my bridesmaids (like these...http://www.shoplatitude.com/red-frida-market-tote.html).  Does anyone know about how much they cost at the markets in Tulum?  I'm assuming they might be cheaper at markets in Playa?

 

I thought about doing this also, but my wedding coordinator said they would be $6-8 USD each.  I didn't check prices while we were there, though!  I ended up doing a custom bag through Wedding Chicks, and using a Gilt City voucher ($100 for $200 of product), so my welcome bags came out to $4.

[sdh8]

I found the vendor reviews on this site super helpful and wanted to post a few reviews of my own...except that a lot of my vendors don't have listings on the vendor review page!  But hopefully this will help any of you Tulum brides who are still in the planning stages.  Good luck, and have fun! 

 

Photographer - Vincent Guihard of Lucidum Photography - http://www.lucidumphotography.com/

I originally contacted Del Sol, but they were completely out of our budget and kindly recommended Vincent, who had worked for Del Sol before he went out on his own.  He was really fantastic, and we are so happy with how our pictures turned out.   We didn’t want a bunch of cheesy photos of us gazing into each other’s eyes—we wanted our photographer to capture the atmosphere at the wedding and get some good shots of our guests.  And Vincent and his assistant really delivered on that front!  He was also great at getting my mom to smile—she always has this fake looking smile in posed pictures, but he managed to get a few genuine smiles out of her during the family photos! 

 

Décor - Katy of Love and Lace - @@MrsHK

I found Katy through these message boards, and she had exactly the type of rustic, vintage-y décor that I was looking for.  We rented bud vases, tea light candle holders, LCD candles and a few other small decorations from her.  Katy has a great selection of super cute items, keeps things reasonably priced, was great about responding quickly and really just made the whole process super easy for me.  We picked everything up from her in Playa del Carmen on our way down to Tulum, and she had everything wrapped and ready for us in suitcases.   I also had Katy buy some colorful market tote bags for me to give to my bridesmaids as welcome/thank you bags.  Katy picked a bunch of cute colors, and I was so glad that I didn’t have to go shopping for them myself (with an impatient, hates-shopping husband in tow) when we got to Mexico!

 

Hair - Cristian of Cristian and Dahena - http://www.cristian-dahena.com/

Cristian was great!  I had read on these boards that hair and makeup was the one area where everyone had total sticker shock.   But Cristian was reasonably priced and did a fantastic job with my hair and my bridesmaids’ hair.  I didn’t have a trial and just showed Cristian a few pictures of the types of styles that I liked, and he picked the one that would work the best on my hair and in the humidity.  I also really liked that (1) they didn’t charge more for my hair because I was the bride (I mean, what’s up with that?), (2) they didn’t require that a certain number of people had to have their hair done, and (3) they didn’t require me to have a trial.

 

Florist – Cherry Blossom Flowers - http://www.cherryblossom.com.mx/ing/index.html

The ladies at Cherry Blossom were wonderful!  They were quick at responding to emails, which was so helpful since I emailed them at the last minute (2 weeks before my wedding!) to ask for quotes (see complaints below re coordinator).  They had the best prices of anyone I spoke with and were also great about making suggestions for types of flowers that were cheaper than the ones I originally asked about (like peonies—I had no idea they were so expensive).  I ordered my bouquet from them and also had them deliver 6 dozen unarranged roses that my bridesmaids cut and arranged in bud vases that morning.  It’s a great way to save money on flowers if you’re able to task someone with this job.

 

DJ – Omar from DJ Music Service Cancun

This is one of the few vendors that my planner recommended, and if I had to do it all over again, I would have gone with one of the DJs that had been positively reviewed on this site.  He played a number of songs that were on our Do NOT Play list (and we didn’t even have that many!), and I don’t think he played any of the songs on our Must Play list, which was only 4 or 5 songs long.  It turns out he didn’t even have some of the songs on our Must Play list, but he didn’t say anything to us about it.  At the end of the day, everyone still danced and had fun, but my husband will forever complain about the DJ playing the Black Eyed Peas at our wedding. 

 

Wedding Coordinator – Angelina Cardenas

There are a lot of glowing reviews of Angie on this site, and when we first met her during our scouting trip, I thought I understood why—she’s very sweet and had some really cute ideas.  But after we signed our contract, everything went downhill.  When she sent us a revised budget after we had sent her our deposit, it was 25% higher than what she had originally estimated.  Communication was pretty terrible—I had expected response times to be slow from reading the reviews on this site, but it was even worse than I had expected.   It really wasn’t until about 3 weeks before the wedding that emails picked up and I started getting any answers.   At that point, I had already started looking for my own vendors.   I relied heavily on the many helpful reviews on this site to find my own vendors, and I ended up being much happier with the vendors that I found.   It was so much easier (and MUCH much faster) to be able to communicate directly with the vendors about what I wanted, and it was also easier to negotiate prices on my own.  I also never felt like Erika/Angie were actually trying to negotiate prices down for us—on the contrary, I usually felt like I was being ripped off.   In the end though, the slow communication was actually a good thing since it forced me to take things into my own hands for the better.  There were so many other little things that were extremely frustrating, but here are the things that really got me peeved.

 

Bait and switch.  We originally met with Angie.  At some point in April, we started getting emails from Erika.  At that point, I really couldn’t have cared less who was emailing me or who was in charge, I was just happy that someone was emailing me back.  But still, I found it incredibly unprofessional that Angie didn’t even email us to let us know that Erika would be taking over.  We figured out later that Angie had another wedding that same weekend. 

 

Incorrect, EXTREMELY VITAL, information.  When we visited Tulum for our scouting trip, we told Angie that we were expecting 100-125 guests.  Our venue was on the smaller side, but she assured us that they would be able to handle up to 100-125 people, so we signed the contract and sent the deposit and the planning began.  Three weeks before the wedding, Erika emailed us and said it was very important that we give them a final headcount because 90 people was the max number of people that our venue could accommodate and we might have to figure out how to convince the manager to let us STILL HAVE THE WEDDING THERE!!!  Luckily for Angie/Erika/my sanity, we had 87 people total, but that could have been a real disaster. 

 

Transportation.  This was probably the most frustrating part of the process.  Angie’s fee was about 9% of our original budget, but we decided that the fee would be worth it since (among other things) she would help our friends and family with transportation from Cancun to Tulum.  She said she could keep track of everyone’s flight info and then would group people who had flights arriving around the same time together so that they could share a shuttle and save on transportation costs.   The trouble started when I asked her for estimates of how much transport would cost so that I could put it in the info sheet that we sent to our guests.  She kept being evasive about the cost and never really gave me a straight answer.  Then she gave me the email address of a travel agent in Tulum and said that my guests should email the travel agent directly to set up transportation.  When I emailed the travel agent to ask about the estimated cost, I also asked if she would be keeping track of everyone’s flight info and grouping people together, and she said that she wouldn’t do that.  So I emailed Angie, and this task got punted back to her.  Angie said to tell my guests to email her, not the travel agent, and that Angie would take care of it.  So, I sent Angie’s info to our guests, and then I started hearing reports that she wasn’t responding to emails.  This was still 5 or 6 weeks out, and these complaints were some of my more Type A friends and family, so I basically told my guests to chill the eff out and reassured them that there was no shortage of shuttles and that Angie would eventually respond to them.  When Angie (actually it was Erika at this point) finally got back to one of my bridesmaids, the quote was way more than what I had told everyone to expect (which was based on the estimate from the travel agent).  When my bridesmaid asked about sharing a shuttle, Erika responded and said that “this service was not available.”  It was yet another miscommunication, but by then, I had had enough.  So I ended up telling our guests not to go through Angie for transportation.  I collected everyone’s flight info, matched people up and then told them to book through USA Transfers (which has a SUPER helpful website, is reasonably priced at $100 for a 10 person van one way, and I didn’t heard any complaints from our guests about them).

 

To end this review on a positive note, we LOVED the ice cream vendor that Erika and Angie recommended.  My husband had also requested tacos al pastor for the tornaboda (late night food), and I think Erika ended up bringing in a separate vendor for that too.  I’m not totally sure of those details (originally Erika said the chef didn’t do tacos al pastor), but whatever Erika did to make the tacos al pastor happen was awesome—the tacos were delicious and were really the big hit of the night.  At the end of the day, I’m glad Erika was there the day of the wedding to oversee everything and deal with the rain-related issues (and to make tacos al pastor happen).  My advice though is that if you wouldn’t have hired a planner for your wedding in the States, don’t let people convince you that just because you’re getting married in Mexico, you need a planner.  You probably don’t!

 

[HoyaBeth]

I also "lurked" during wedding planning, more than I actually posted, so here's my attempt to provide a little Vendor Info to those of you who are also getting married in amazing, beautiful Tulum!  Here are some pics from our photographer, so you can see the decor, hair, makeup in action!

 

Canada Transfers - Transportation

Since Tulum is approximately 90 minutes from the airport, we wanted to arrange our guests' transport arrangements from the airport to the hotel.  This was my husband's wedding project since he's detail oriented and speaks Spanish.  Whenever he called, he always talked to the same person (a live human!) who quickly became familiar with our wedding info and guests.  All the drivers were prompt, professional and received rave reviews from guests.  One driver even waited when a guest couldn't get into their condo right away.  We also had to make last minute changes due to missed flights.  They handled it all without missing a beat.  We can't say enough good things about working with Canada Transfers.  In fact, we always rent a car when visiting, but have decided on our next trip, we'll just let these guys take care of us!  

 

The Makeup Pros - Hair and Makeup

Yes, prices are very similar to DC or NY bridal hair/makeup, but it was SO worth it.  I can't even begin to describe how beautiful I felt and how great it was to have these guys help us get ready.  It was like chatting with an old friend who happened to do the best makeup EVER. Friends and family were so complimentary - I mean, I guess it's to be expected, I was the bride and all, but they were gushing.

 

I communicated over email with Fernando to set things up, which was pretty simple.  He wasn't available for my wedding, so he offered his partner, Julius, for makeup and then Cesar for hair.  At first, I was a little nervous since all the reviews I could dig up were for Fernando, so I was wondering where they were hiding this Julius character.  Turns out, he also does photo shoots and travels all over the place for MAC so isn't always in town.  So yeah, I totally lucked out because he is incredibly talented!  I explained that I wanted a shimmery brown/golden eye and whatever else he thought best flattered my features and coloring and he definitely delivered.

 

As for hair, I knew I wanted it up (would definitely recommend that in Tulum due to the wind!) so showed a few pics to Cesar on the day of.  He and I had the same favorite look (updo with a braid wrapped around it), so he quickly got to work.  I brought extensions to help give my fine, medium length hair enough oomph for the updo.  He painstakingly put in all 7 of those bad boys and blended them seamlessly.  I still have a big smile on my face thinking of my hair that day - for once in my life, could have been in a Pantene commercial or something.

 

I skipped trial to save on time and cost, and it was totally fine - these guys are pros.  They arrived right on time, were so nice, and very talented.

 

Plugin Audiovisual - DJ

They actually had a place to review on the vendor reviews page, so here's my review there.  To save yourself the click, they were awesome!

 

Blue Lens Caribe - Videographer

Long review short: We'd hire Blue Lens Caribe and Nicolas again in a heartbeat and am so, so happy we decided to capture our wedding on video.  It's one area we were on the fence about, but now that I know how fast your own wedding goes by, having those moments on video is priceless.  We got the package of one videographer, unlimited coverage on your wedding day.

 

Our wedding coordinator recommended BLC and from start to finish, communication was easy and they were very responsive.  We met Nicolas (our videographer) onsite a few days before the wedding to go over style, songs etc. 

During our actual wedding, Nicolas and an assistant videographer (surprise, score!) arrived right on time and worked their tails off all day long.  Plus, like everyone else we dealt with when booking BLC, these videographers were really nice guys! 

And less than a month after our wedding day, we had our five-minute video "trailer" in hand (full length had to be mailed).  It was fantastic!  They captured the highlights of our wedding so beautifully, so artistically, that we couldn't imagine having hired anyone else.  We got a great value for our money, which isn't always the case with all things wedding.

 

Cherry Blossom - Florist

Flowers weren't really the most important thing to us, so this was one area we wanted to try to save a little money, while still having things look nice.  Sandra from Cherry Blossom has to be one of the most patient people on the planet, since I asked her so many questions and took so long to make a decision that it would have to frustrate most anyone.  She was also so nice, very responsive and took pride in her business.  Prices were reasonable as well.  Since our wedding was on the same weekend as Mother's Day, she gently helped us get our order in on time so we'd have the flowers we wanted.

 

Overall, she and her team did a wonderful job on our flowers, the overall color scheme being coral.  They did our centerpieces, boutonnieres, bouquets and wedding arch using a variety of flowers incorporating coral, cream, dark pink and orange.  I loved my ombre bouquet, but it was supposed to be coral, blush and cream -- and somehow lavender was swapped in for blush.  It looked a little strange next to the orange boutonniere, but If that's the only snafu, I guess I'll take it!

 

Royal Table Cancun

Since we acted as our own wedding planner, we needed to make some additional arrangements.  Especially important were the ceremony chairs.  Some of my original quotes were way out of our budget ($15 per chair, no thank you!) but Royal Table was fair and had a great variety from which to choose.  We ended up paying a little more to get ghost chairs, which I had never heard of before but quickly became obsessed with.  I had this vision of guests walking down to the ceremony area and being able to see completely through the chairs and focus on the beautiful water.  Then the chairs could be moved up for the reception.  Once I learned that it would be a big logistical challenge to move 'em, I had to choose between the ceremony and reception for my beautiful ghost chairs - and due to the amount of time we were spending at the reception, it won out.  We also ended up renting some basic tablecloths from them, but brought our own runners, napkins, napkin rings and table signs.  They delivered and picked up right on time; you do need to realize that that is an extra charge, but nothing outlandish.  It's just not quoted in the price of the chair rental itself.

 

Best of luck to all of the future brides out there!  A destination wedding was a great choice for us and I hope it is for you as well!

[iWeddingMexico]

Tulum is definitely a great place to have a more romantic and personal feeling wedding. As a wedding planner I personally LOVE Akiin! 

 

In regards to hiring a wedding planner I definitely think for most brides it could be a big help, especially when dealing with another country. I personally don`t expect my brides to do a whole lot apart from sharing their dream with me and set up a payment plan so I can arrange the vendors, so I guess it really depends on who you are selecting and what they are offering. For a bride who already has a hectic schedule back home it could be a big plus. 

 

Back to Tulum though, Akiin is one of the best, great workers. Smaller weddings I would reccommend Hip Hotel as well, great food! If anyone ever has any questions or needs advice on Tulum I will be more than happy to help! Happy Planning!

 

Akiin Wedding April 2014 (palapa for dancefloor and above palapa for dinner)