Overall, the venue is decently priced for a Sedona wedding, and with catering/bar/linens all being a part of the Sedona Golf Resort packages for ceremony & reception, this made thi...ngs easy in terms of not needing to coordinate those types of vendors.
As the planning process started to come along, a few things were not explained very clearly to us in regards to how the open bar was operated. First, everything was explained to us verbally, which made it difficult to go back and try to find concrete reasoning for actions, both on our side and the venue’s side. The open bar, from our understanding (our being me and my husband, as well as my father and his wife) were all paid for in advance and anything left undrank was to be refunded. Nothing was disclosed to us about how special order items were handled differently, or that refunds only applied to unopened cases of beer/wine/etc. We ended up being sent home with quite a bit of special order wine and ciders we had no intention of having to travel home with, and that was an area of our spending that I was hoping to get some credit back for, as my intention was to over-calculate the bar and receive a refund. The venue could not find proof where they explained the bar correctly to us, and it was a mistake we as the consumers ended up having to take the hit for.
In addition to this, guests were served premium drinks all night, and I was later informed that beer was being served before our ceremony, and shots were served at the reception, which I had asked not to. This combination caused us to have to purchase an additional beer keg package before dinner, AND we ran out of our hard liquor tab 30 minutes before final call, which I REALLY was not expecting. The alcohol overall was my biggest issue, as I felt it was handled very poorly. It seemed the venue was more interested in getting their money rather than trying to work with us on the amount we spent (which was not cheap), and be somewhat conservative in order to make everything last the whole night. I feel that if a guest orders a cranberry vodka, they should not have been given premium, but we were charged for all premium drinks all night, which is absolutely why our bar tab was completely gone before the night was over.
As for some few small detail items on the day of, none of the votive candles for our centerpieces, sweetheart table, or entry way, had been lit for the entire evening. In addition, we had paid for outdoor heaters for the whole evening. Upon guests’ arrival around 4 PM, until the end of the evening, the heaters were never turned on. This was a very cold Saturday in February, and we had rented these from the venue to ensure our guests were comfortable in the very cold weather.
Lastly, the venue coordinator, Katie, was pregnant prior to our event date. She ended up leaving our event right after the ceremony. Once we came back from photos on the golf course, we were left alone in the buffet room for about a half hour trying to find someone to help us figure out what was going on. No one was really present to get us moving on to the next item of the evening. Then, at the end of everything, I never even received a thank you follow-up from the venue for hosting our event at the venue. The only contact we received from Katie after our event was a response to our bar tab issues, in which she was very short with us and again, never thanked us.