To say I'm surprised about the way that the Crystal Ballroom of Veranda is treating the (COVID19) pandemic, is honestly no surprise at all. According to clients who have contracts with the Crystal Ballroom in Veranda, the venue is not offering refunds because the contract does not cover you for Pandemic events. Don't let the fact that there is a Pandemic fool you though, they've been shady like this even before the pandemic. Here's an example, my wedding back in May 2019:
In the very beginning when we were looking for venues, the Crystal Ballroom actually seemed like the perfect fit for what we were looking for being that everywhere else didn't offer silverware, decorations, and cleanup. The only star that they are truly going to get from me is how pretty the venue is, and that's about it. After they received our money is when things started to go downhill. Every time we went to visit the crystal ballroom to follow up with the venue it was a nightmare and we truly felt as if they were coming up with anything that they could to try to cancel our event. Honestly I already know how stressful planning a wedding was, and they were supposed to make it easier not harder. In fact the most stressful part about my wedding was actually working with this venue. They threatened to cancel our event three days before the actual wedding when we already had over 150 people confirmed to come to the wedding, had already had our catering in place, videographer planned, photographer planned, and so on. There were a lot of things about this place that I didn't find out about until later, but I wish somebody did talk about it in a review before we actually picked this venue. The only reason this event didn't get canceled was because of our coordinator, whom I appreciated him fighting for us.
The day of my actual wedding, I did run about two hours late because of my hairdresser. I reached out and informed them of my late arrival and my mother in law had requested that since I was running late, to please go on ahead and offer hors d'oeuvres to the guests that were waiting for me to arrive. They refused to do so, and all of my guests were starving on top of waiting for my arrival. There was no reason that they could not have given any of the guests some food while waiting, being that my wedding party where the only people who did get some of the hors d'oeuvres, but where was the rest of it? We knew that we had ordered plenty of food, and that there should have been enough for the rest of our guests.
After my wedding is when I started hearing from my guests of their critiques of the venue. They had told me that at some point they just refused to give out any alcohol, even though there was no shortage of alcohol. They had also told me that the silverware, dishes and glassware were all so dirty and it was a hassle to request for new ones. The staff had actually told some of my guests that the venue themselves planned a wedding right before mine and only had an hour to clean up the previous wedding, to then set up for my wedding. The staff were all tired, and this was their explanation as to why they were not as attentive as they could have been. At this point is when I knew why they were pushing so hard to cancel our event. It was because they had already planned a previous wedding over mine and didn't want to have two weddings overlap.
So I hope all of you who are reading this will know what to lookout for when picking a venue, especially now hearing about how they are handling their current clients during the (COVID 19) pandemic. They're trying to suck out as much money as they possibly can to keep in business, and they don't really care who they screw over in the process of doing so. read more