To us, our wedding day is going to be the most important day of our lives.
We booked One Warwick Park Hotel under the impression that we would have one dedicated wedding coordinator that would assist us on answering our questions and to help ensure that we would have the most perfect day.
This is far from what we have received. We have received poor service from the moment we paid our deposit. No one can give you a straight answer to simple questions, on multiple occasions we received replies from two different members of staff stating different outcomes to the same question. We had to continuously chase for a reply to nearly every email.
We went from having doubts with whether we chose the right venue to being disappointed and upset after COVID-19 hit. Upon the initial lockdown of the UK, we emailed in regards to our wedding this September. We wanted to ensure we forward planned and asked if it was at all possible to hold a date for 2021. We were realistic in thinking that with postponements in March, April, May and June dates next year would get filled up very quickly and expressed we would ideally not want to wait until 2022. Their response was that we should not worry as there was ‘good availability on all key dates in 2021’.
We were understanding of the venue that they would not be able to guarantee out numbers etc as this was down the government guidelines. We were however concerned that our some of our family members and friends would be unable to attend due to being classed as vulnerable and also potential restrictions on the amount of people allowed within the venue. We took these concerns to the team at One Warwick Park who gave us three options: To cancel the wedding completely and we would lose our deposit, to rebook for next year however we would be required to pay an additional £1500 or to stay with our original date and hope for the best. At this point cancelling has not even crossed our mind and we were slightly shocked that this was their first option.
We requested the availability for the rest of 2020 and 2021 so that we could make an informed decision on whether to move to the wedding back. We were provided with three dates between December 2020 and September 2021. To me this is not good availability and if we had not requested the dates so promtly there may have been none available.
We made the decision to change the date to May 2021 and agreed the £1500 cost increase. We were then told that we had to still pay the full balance (nearly £12000 including the additional £1500) as per our original contract date. This would mean we would have paid the full balance 8 months before the new wedding date.
We felt that One Warwick Park had picked the parts of the contract that benefitted them and ignored that parts that would have benefitted us.
We expressed our disappointment but this didn’t change things. Our suppliers were wonderful about re-arranging reassuring us that we were all in this together and that they would support us the whole way. We received the complete opposite from One Warwick Park, just money grabbing emails.
My future husband is a key worker and working from home myself we understand the pressure that people are under with things happening out of our control and would have appreciated some sort of help to re-arrange our wedding at a venue we once loved.
We have made the decision to cancel our wedding at One Warwick Park Hotel and emailed to notify them of this. My fiancé is still awaiting acknowledgment of this email. I emailed to ensure our registrar was notified and had the quickest response time yet to let us know they’d notify them.
Overall, we are disheartened with the poor service that we received since making our initial payment. Ourselves and our families are extremely disappointed with how stressful and upsetting they have made this whole experience, therefore I wouldn't recommend this venue to anyone!
