Let me preface this by saying we booked our Oct 22, 2011 wedding in January of this year. I began calling all of our vendors, including our venue, in the middle of July to pay all of them in full so that I that would be one less this for me to worry about. We are getting married at a local B&B that has a garden area and reception house for weddings - one of those deals where they take care of everything so you dont have to worry about anything. For 3 weeks I had been calling our venue and leaving messages inquiring about the preferred way to go about paying them in full. Finally after 3 weeks I get a call from the owner's sister who says the owner is on vacation and she will leave a message for her to call me back when she returns in 3 days. A week later I still had not heard from her so I called and left another message and didn't even try to hide the annoyance in my voice.
I finally get a call back from her that evening at 6:45 pm while I am at a restaurant having dinner with my family. She matter-of-factly informs me that she double-booked our date. (We booked the grounds from 9:30am - 2pm, our wedding starts at 11:00 am, reception immediately following) The wedding that she booked begins at 2pm. She doesn't apologize - NOTHING. Then she says that since the other wedding party purchased a larger wedding package than we did, that they have precedence over us!!!!!!!!!! AND that she may need to "scoot us out early" to make room for them!!!!!!!! She also had the gall to ask if we could do our wedding at 9:00 am instead so that we could be gone in time for the other bride to have the grounds to get ready!!!!! Keep in mind we have already mailed our invitations, and a handful of our out of town guests have already booked their flights and hotel rooms!
I was so SHOCKED that I had no idea what to say or how to handle the situation so I handed the phone to my fiancee. After she explained the situation to him he reminded her that we had a signed contract stating that the grounds were ours until 2pm and ultimately it was not our responsibility to make this work for the other bride. She told him that "since he wanted to act ugly there was nothing she could do about it" and then said that we hadn't even paid for our wedding package in full yet! He explained to her that we had been calling for nearly a month trying to get ahold of someone to make our payment and told her that we would call first thing in the morning to set a time to come in and work things out in person and pay what we owe.
The next morning he called her, of course, she didn't answer. We left a message and never heard back from her. Our contract says that if we do not pay in full 60 days prior to our wedding date, then we lose our deposit and our date. In exactly 1 week will be 60 days till our date. Finally this morning my fiancee called from his office at work instead of his cell phone and surprise, surprise! She answered! She said that she deleted his voicemail before she got a chance to write his number down...Even thought all cell phones have caller ID these days AND she has all of our contact information on our contract. So we are supposed to meet with her tomorrow at 4:30 to discuss the situation and pay her in full. My thinking is that she is trying to push the time limit in calling us back so that we automatically lose our deposit and our date.
Now, I am worried that she is going to sabotage my wedding since we are holding her up to her contract obligation. Or that she is going to avoid us until after next week so that we lose our deposit and our date. We have thought about sending a certified letter with a check so that we know she received it and that way we have proof that she received it. Any advice????