This is a beautiful venue, and so many of the Castle's preferred vendors were phenomenal, however, unfortunately, the worst part about the venue is the venue coordinators. We had the misfortune of working with Hunter and Emma from the venue and the level of communication, support and service was highly lacking, especially for a venue and organization of this scale and cost. There were a number of instances, the most egregious which, will be detailed below where communication was either flat out incorrect or just slow. Ultimately, communication from the Ladyhawke staff was the biggest stressor around planning our wedding and facilitating the event day-of. Additionally, it was also further disappointing as we shared feedback during the experience and even afterwards summarizing to which we did not get a response, showing lack of etiquette or any sense of responsibility.
One of the biggest misses from their team was our wedding rehearsal. We were informed in our initial planning meeting that our rehearsal would be at 9AM the day before the wedding, prior to the arrival of any other party having an event the prior day. We learned (at our prompting) in our final planning meeting 2 weeks from the event that they had allowed another party to book their prep over that slot. We had to urge the venue to work with the other party to find a solution to do this the day prior. This still ended up not even being a true rehearsal where you do a mock version of the ceremony, more of a "this is where the ceremony will occur" as opposed to practicing what we would do. Everyone involved was disappointed in this and we had to do our own practice run through which still didn't help as we didn't get run through the actual ceremony.
The other major miss from their team was we in this initial meeting were told if we had a shuttle, people could leave cars in the lot and come back for them the next morning, to ensure everyone's safety given there would be drinking and this was an unfamiliar, windy mountainous area. At the end of the evening we were told this was no longer an option and everyone needed to leave. We were able to figure out sober drivers, but this could have been catastrophic, especially for guests unfamiliar with the area and driving on mountain roads. This showed extremely poor and disingenuous communication, and if leaving cars until the morning was no longer option, this information should be communicated with your clients.
This is just the most egregious issues. There was numerous other instances where communication from the Castle Ladyhawke team was lacking, and seemingly, the only way to reach them is to pester their team multiple times until someone finally responds. Some instances we did not even get responses leading to more stress the day before and day of the event.
It was unfortunate that the staff was this difficult to work with for a venue of this scale, and a venue with such a large price tag. The indifference from the coordination team was deeply disappointing seeing how little they cared. Again, beautiful venue, awful planning experience. read more
