We booked the St George's Room for my son's birthday today and the whole thing was a mess. When we arrived, the woman (Joanna) at the front desk was confused as to who we were and what we were doing there, and at first, led us to the wrong room. Then, when we got to the right room, none of the furniture we had asked to for was there (tables and chairs etc.) so we had to move everything in in the half an hour we had to set up. As a result if this, I was still frantically trying to get all the food and decorations out when our guests began to arrive. Honestly, I was super embarrassed.
We were told that the confusion was caused by the fact that our booking had been listed as "tentative" despite the fact that we had paid, in full, 10 days beforehand.
Joanna wasn't particularly helpful and only agreed to bring the furniture down after several requests but then, I suppose it's hard when you're the only person on duty...
During the party we were left to our own devices, which was totally fine and actually quite nice since we could just get on with things. Might have been nice to have had someone peek there head in and ask if we'd got set up ok given the previous kuffuffle, but oh well.
At the end, we cleaned up and as I went to leave, we were informed that we needed to stack the chairs. Which was fine, no problem with that, except we weren't told that we would need to do this previously, and their "chair stacking system" wasn't explained to us so we ended up doing it wrong and then having to start over. All of this on top of having to care for a tired one-year old was already too much and then we were told we needed to take out the garbage. Frankly, I lost it at that. Thankfully Joanna actually stepped up and offered to do it for us. So thanks for that Joanna!
The room was also nowhere near as nice as it appeared in the pictures posted on the website and I was pretty disappointed considering how much they charge.
Over all a bad experience. I won't be going back and I will be warning others not to book these rooms for events.
Furthermore:
Our booking was on the 23rd of March. We just received our deposit back today...its the 6th of May. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to take 6 weeks to get our money back, especially after disgraceful service. We had to ask them to send a cheque because they couldn't refund it on Visa unless we came in. They didn't bother to let us know that. I doubt we would have got our deposit back without chasing it up.
To their credit, they did try to placate us with a $50 giftcard which, although it doesn't give me back my son's first birthday party (sans embarrassment and chaos) was somewhat nice.
There will certainly be no next time. read more