Things Start to Go Wrong

One of our biggest challenges in the weeks leading up to the wedding was issues with our venue.  Specifically, with the event coordinator.

I am all for booking your wedding somewhere cheap that doesn't do a lot of weddings to save money, but I learned via our event coordinators that there are consequences.  Places that don't do many weddings tend to not really know what they're doing.  They don't put as much effort into it.

They also apparently cannot keep an event coordinator.  At least, ours couldn't.  We had four different coordinators in the 9 months leading up to our wedding.  The person we originally talked to was gone before we even booked.  The next one we had for most of the planning stage.  When she left, no one even told us, and we just happened to stop by the venue and ask for her one day and found out they had just hired someone new.  That person we never even spoke to, for she was quickly replaced by a fourth coordinator who our coordinator for the day of the wedding.

This was the only real problem we had with Guayma's.  The lack of consistency was ridiculous.  The fact that they didn't inform us of the changes was, frankly, unacceptable.

So we were pretty nervous when we met with the final coordinator for the first time a mere two weeks before our wedding.  But what seemed like a disaster turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  Rachel was great, wayyyyy better than the person we had been working with before.  She was organized, efficient, knowledgeable, and most importantly, she understood how important this day was to us, something we had not gotten from anyone else at Guayma's.

We were glad to have her, but we really wish we had gotten to speak with her sooner (too bad she hadn't started working there until about three weeks before the wedding) because a bunch of things changed once we did.  We had to redo the seating chart and couldn't finalize it until a week before the wedding because they weren't sure how many tables would fit how many people.  We didn't know what time we could come to set up until the day before the wedding.  And we couldn't go over things with her as much as we wanted because she was gone for three days right before the wedding.  We literally only had the day before to go over everything, and there were definitely things I forgot about at that point that were done wrong.  I really wish we had been able to get it all done sooner.  Some of the things that went wrong that wouldn't have if we had had more time still bug the crap out of me.

Even though things mostly worked out, they would have gone much, much smoother if we had been able to plan with the coordinator farther in advance.  Though your venue probably won't have as high of turn-over as ours, experience is definitely something you should think about when booking a venue.  Because if we had had one of the other coordinators, things definitely would not have gone as smoothly even if we had had months to plan.

We wouldn't have picked a different venue.  We didn't have the money, and doing the venue cheaply allowed us to do so much more.  But if we had had the money, it would have been nice to perhaps hire a wedding coordinator or something to make sure everything got done right.

Did you have bad experiences with any of your vendors?  Was your venue everything you thought it would be?