Waterford Castle wedding reviews

sparkling sea

Attend a wedding a Waterford Castle recently and would highly recommend it as a venue; it was brillant.

Viserion

We got married in Waterford Castle 6 weeks ago and we would not recommend it at all.

mcland

Viserion wrote: »

We got married in Waterford Castle 6 weeks ago and we would not recommend it at all.

Really Viseron? Sorry to hear that. We have booked it so thats a bit worrying to hear. Were there many issues?

pwurple

What happened viserion? I was at a wedding in april there and it was fantastic. food and drink was great, rooms were lovely.

homemadecider

I attended a wedding there a few weeks ago and wasn't impressed by anything except the food. In summary:

• Bedroom was quite small, carpets were stained, windows were covered in cobwebs
• The bar was crazy expensive. A glass of wine was €9.50. I asked for the wine list and the cheapest bottle was well over €30. I was pretty annoyed that we weren't warned in advance of the prices, I would have brought something with me
• The shower half exploded when the bride was getting ready, they had to get a plumber to fix it. When we arrived at the venue the water was leaking through the ceiling into the dining room and staff were busy putting buckets around to catch the drips. Hardly a luxury experience
• I felt the place was pretty cramped and the wedding we were at was only 60 people. The same place you have the ceremony is where you also the reception desk where you check in, it certainly detracted from the 'magic' of the ceremony venue. This was the same place that the dancing was happening later but it was in a different room to the bar so lots of people congregated either at the bar or outside and the dancefloor was fairly neglected.

Overall I really didn't like it as a venue and it cost me a fortune as a guest to attend that wedding. The only up side was the food which was very good.

pwurple

Sounds like you were at viserion's wedding!

The wedding I was at in April was just under 100 people I think, and we didn't feel cramped at ceremony or dinner. Dance floor was jammers all night, but the crowd were mega-dancers, and the DJ was a legend.

Reception desk was in the ceremony room. The couple had decorated it with flowers and vases, and put some big birch trees next to the fireplace where the reception was, so you barely noticed there was a desk down the back somewhere. Just looked like more decorations.

Can't speak to the bar prices, couple had an open bar.

Waterford has had financial issues though since, so maybe it's different now?

Viserion

I don't know if it is anything to do with their going into receivership, provisional liquidation etc. but if it is, they should not be insistent that it is business as usual when it really isn't. I double-checked everything numerous times coming up to our wedding day and I was told it was "business as usual", I was almost made to feel foolish for worrying.

There were lots of small issues, no ice, no straws and no lemons at the bar and they ran out of heineken at around 9p.m. but the big issues were:

An hour before the ceremony a member of staff approached me to ask me if we were going to be having flowers in the room where we were getting married (we did not get married in the reception hall). It had been arranged with the wedding coordinator months beforehand that they would decorate the ceremony room and the dining table with some simple flower arrangements, nothing too extravagant. When I told the member of staff that they were supposed to be providing the flowers, I was told that they would "go into the kitchen and throw something together". When I was finishing getting ready I was wondering if there would be any flowers or what the situation would be. In the end there was one small arrangement of flowers on the table at the top of the room and that was it. The decorations on the dining table mainly consisted of a large candleholder that dripped wax on people's dinner plates and had to be removed from the table. They added E100.00 onto our bill for this.

There were no lightbulbs in the light fixtures in the suite we stayed in apart from two lamps, of course we only discovered this at 3a.m., at which time there was only one staff member left downstairs and he was manning the bar, tidying up and locking up everywhere.

The two biggest issues for me was that I never got to meet the wedding coordinator who I had corresponded with for months before the wedding. Any other review I have read of Waterford Castle has said that the wedding coordinator was around all day if needed, she didn't even introduce herself to me. I was in the Castle with my sister from 1p.m. on the Friday until around 1p.m. the following day and not once during that time did the wedding coordinator approach me to just say hello and introduce herself. I found that extremely unprofessional.

The second biggest issue for me was that they ruined our wedding cake. I don't say that lightly. We ended up having to throw away just over half of our wedding cake because it was inedible after being left in their care.
We did the fake cutting of the cake thing on the Friday night after the wedding dinner and I then asked one of the staff if there was somewhere they could store the cake and was told that was no problem and they took the cake away and that was the last I heard of it. The next day when we were leaving, my sister's car was full so I asked one of the members of staff at reception if we could pick up the cake later and I was again told that this was no problem. We returned later that day to pick up the cake. The cake was handed to me and a section at the back of the cake looked like something had been spilled on it and the icing was melting off the cake and dripping off the cake board. When I asked the member of staff at reception what had happened she shrugged her shoulders and said "maybe somebody spilled something on it" and went back to what she was doing behind the desk and didn't look up again. My sister and I went outside the main door (the reception hall is quite dark in the evenings) to take some pictures of the damage. When we got home I tried to rescue what was left of the cake by cutting off the icing layer so that we could at least eat the spongey part but the sponge underneath was extremely soggy and inedible. I e-mailed the wedding coordinator immediately and e-mails went back and forth between us and in the end she said "nobody who was working on the day is taking responsibility for it and everybody claims that the cake was in perfect condition when they last saw it". During the course of our e-mail correspondence she seemed to suggest that I was at fault because I did not provide a box or cover for the cake but I was not asked for either and I would assume that a wedding venue would have suitable storage facilities for a wedding cake. I also found the e-mails from the wedding coordinator very passive-aggressive and it later transpired that nobody else in the Castle was even aware that I had made a complaint.
It was only after I posted a review on Tripadvisor that I received communication from the general manager. He left a reply to my review on Tripadvisor, trying to make out everything was hunky dory, when up to that point nobody had made any effort to come up with a solution.

After the general manager replied to my review on Tripadvisor, another senior member of staff got involved and informed me that the cake had been incorrectly stored in a fridge and that is why it had become damaged, apparently the type of icing on the cake is unsuitable for fridge storage. He also told me that a member of staff had told him that I had instructed them to put the cake in the fridge - a conversation that never happened, and furthermore, staff at a wedding venue (this particular member of staff has worked in the Castle for many years or so I was told) should know how to store any kind of wedding cake, regardless of what anybody else says to them. I certainly didn't tell anybody there what to do with it other than to store it somewhere safe.

Now our day has passed and Waterford Castle have basically washed their hands of the matter. I didn't want compensation in any form from them, although that was their only solution to resolving the issues. I would just like to warn anybody else thinking of booking their wedding there that maybe things aren't as good as they used to be.
It's all fine and well offering compensation after the fact but nothing can make up for something going wrong on your wedding day and as a prominent wedding venue they should have all bases covered. I would have thought, particularly with their current financial problems, that they would have been putting on an extra effort to reassure their customers.

Viserion

homemadecider wrote: »

I attended a wedding there a few weeks ago and wasn't impressed by anything except the food. In summary:

• Bedroom was quite small, carpets were stained, windows were covered in cobwebs
• The bar was crazy expensive. A glass of wine was €9.50. I asked for the wine list and the cheapest bottle was well over €30. I was pretty annoyed that we weren't warned in advance of the prices, I would have brought something with me
• The shower half exploded when the bride was getting ready, they had to get a plumber to fix it. When we arrived at the venue the water was leaking through the ceiling into the dining room and staff were busy putting buckets around to catch the drips. Hardly a luxury experience
• I felt the place was pretty cramped and the wedding we were at was only 60 people. The same place you have the ceremony is where you also the reception desk where you check in, it certainly detracted from the 'magic' of the ceremony venue. This was the same place that the dancing was happening later but it was in a different room to the bar so lots of people congregated either at the bar or outside and the dancefloor was fairly neglected.

Overall I really didn't like it as a venue and it cost me a fortune as a guest to attend that wedding. The only up side was the food which was very good.

They charge E12.00 corkage on a bottle of wine and E15.00 on a bottle of champagne.

I agree though, the food was brilliant and probably one of the best things about the whole day.

pwurple

The wedding coordinator should have been around alright. I met her myself at my friends wedding because I was helping the stylist with the decorations. Very odd she wasn't there, she was super organised and efficient when I met her.

On the cake thing, at my own wedding, my cake was totally destroyed as well, BEFORE it was cut or eaten. It was delivered in the morning by the cake people. The venue staff placed it on a beautiful stand in a nice bright window.... on a roasting august day. It was a chocolate cake. It turned into a puddle in the heat! So I feel your pain.

I brushed it off on the day, and people didn't notice, but the next day I was raging. Nothing came of it. But sure.... years later, we have a laugh about it, and I have a picture of the chocolate puddle. Mishaps happen at all weddings, either guest related, or something going wrong with the arrangements.

No supplies in the bar is annoying as well.

Viserion

pwurple wrote: »

The wedding coordinator should have been around alright. I met her myself at my friends wedding because I was helping the stylist with the decorations. Very odd she wasn't there, she was super organised and efficient when I met her.

On the cake thing, at my own wedding, my cake was totally destroyed as well, BEFORE it was cut or eaten. It was delivered in the morning by the cake people. The venue staff placed it on a beautiful stand in a nice bright window.... on a roasting august day. It was a chocolate cake. It turned into a puddle in the heat! So I feel your pain.

I brushed it off on the day, and people didn't notice, but the next day I was raging. Nothing came of it. But sure.... years later, we have a laugh about it, and I have a picture of the chocolate puddle. Mishaps happen at all weddings, either guest related, or something going wrong with the arrangements.

No supplies in the bar is annoying as well.

She was there, she just didn't bother introducing herself.

The thing about the cake was that we had a party at our house the following day and everybody asked about the cake because they were obviously expecting to get a piece so that made it stand out so much more.

pwurple

Viserion wrote: »

She was there, she just didn't bother introducing herself.

Had you not already met her before when booking the wedding and making the arrangements though? I'd expect a few meetings with the coordinator before a wedding to be honest.

Was there a change in coordinator?

mcland

pwurple wrote: »

Had you not already met her before when booking the wedding and making the arrangements though? I'd expect a few meetings with the coordinator before a wedding to be honest.

Was there a change in coordinator?

That's true. We have met her twice, at our initial viewing and when we came back to pay our deposit. She was very professional and has been great via email too.

Viserion

No, never met her at all. And no, there was no change in wedding coordinator.

She knew what time I was going to be arriving at the Castle with my sister and I expected that she would be there just to say hello and introduce herself or at the very least, if she was unavailable that someone would be there to say hello.

She seemed very professional before the wedding but the tone of her e-mail correspondence after the wedding really let her down.

username123

Sorry to hear all that Viserion. Very very poor form of the wedding co-ordinator also.

pwurple

Viserion wrote: »

No, never met her at all. And no, there was no change in wedding coordinator.

I don't understand though... how did you book your wedding? Did you not visit the venue to view the arrangements, pay deposit, see the decor? The coordinator does all those jobs with you. My friend who had her wedding there had several meetings, I'd say at least 3, one was the morning of another wedding to see how the place was set up. I was at that one of the meetings myself, to take notes about the flowers and other bits needed. How come you didn't do those meetings? You would have no idea what the place would look like in advance otherwise.

I'd say that was why she didn't introduce herself, normally couples would have met her multiple times by then.

Viserion

We went to view the Castle on our own and everything else was done by e-mail or by phone. We had been to the Castle a few times before we booked our wedding there.

username123

pwurple wrote: »

I don't understand though...

I'd say that was why she didn't introduce herself, normally couples would have met her multiple times by then.

Surely the co-ordinator should have made it her business to meet the couple, especially considering they had otherwise only engaged via phone or email. I think it's shockingly poor form she didn't introduce herself.