Well we're back from our weddingmoon on St. John. Lots of mixed feelings, mostly sad that so many things went wrong and that we were overcharged/robbed by so many vendors. I'll start on a positive note.
THE GOOD
Our resort, Estate Concordia, was AWESOME. The people were friendly, the staff went out of their way to help our guests and us have a good time despite the lousy weather and various snafus. I would recommend them to anyone in a heartbeat. I would have used only them if I could do it all over again. When our cake caterers delivered only cupcakes and not the cutting cake, they made us a cake AT NO EXTRA CHARGE. When we had two extra people show up because I had miscounted who was bringing a guest, they added two more chairs, two more place settings, and cooked up two more chicken breasts to make up for it AT NO EXTRA CHARGE. It's not a four-star luxury hotel but it's surrounded by the natural beauty of St John and is a great place to get away from it all. If the weather had cooperated more it would have been a dream vacation.
The other good was our photographer, Sage Crown Parker, who did an AWESOME job despite our lack of coordination and the cloudy weather. You can see our photographs here:
http://www.usviphotographer.com/p29977890/hcebdb93#hcebdb93THE BAD
The weather. Don't ever take it lightly when you are making plans to travel somewhere and someone tells you "it's the rainy season" at the time you are planning to be there. If I'd have knon just how rainy it would be I'd have booked in December instead, or even January or February. It wasn't worth the money we saved to book in the off season to sit in our hotel day after day in torrential rains. Luckily the sun came out at the end to save our low low spirits, but still it was difficult.
It stormed the morning of our ceremony, cleared up just in time for the ceremony (thankfully), but then rained the rest of the afternoon and REALLY stormed during the reception. While we were cutting our cake I wasn't sure whether or not the table would be blown away, that's how strong the wind was blowing.
Another bad is that two of the four boxes I had sent down ahead of time, never showed up. We sent them USPS Parcel Post with delivery confirmation over a month in advance. I was told by the Concordia staff that unless you send things Priority, you have no idea if/when your package might arrive. So if you decide to send things down to you DW in advance like I did, make SURE you spend the extra $$ and send it Priority. One of the boxes contained the gift bags for all my guests
The other box contained misc. decorating items and everything I needed for our postcard geust book, so I had neither a guest book or gift bags for my guests which made me sad. Still, it could have been worse.
THE UGLY
The vendors we used on St John, save the good people of Estate Concordia who I can't say enough good things about, were all poor or downright terrible.
As I mentioned, our cake caterer, Katilady, delivered only the cupcakes and not the cutting cake. They delivered the cupcakes in the morning and had 5 or 6 hours when they could have made it right by having their baker bake us a cake but they made no effort to do so. They didn't call, email, or leave us any message at the hotel or apologize or offer a refund. They only replied to me and offered a *partial* refund AFTER I emailed them. The refund they offered didn't even cover the full invoiced price of the cake. They should have offered at least a 50% refund for the entire bill IMHO. We're still waiting for an additional response from them.
I had booked manicures, updos and makeup applications at The Beauty Lounge in Cruz Bay, St. John. Two of my bridesmaids couldn't come to the manicures on Friday because they had flights cancel or missed the ferry to St. John because they were lost, so I canceled both the manicures on Friday and the updo/makeup on Saturday via email (we had no phone service on our side of the island). I quickly realized that getting from one end of the island to the other was difficult and wouldn't be feasible on the wedding day (it's a 45-min drive from where we stayed to Cruz Bay, over mountains with washed-out roads in many places due to the rains). If I had known that I would never had booked the appointments in the first place. The Beauty Lounge charged us over $400 two days AFTER the wedding for services we never received, even though I had canceled the appointments. I understand charging a $25 or $50 missed appointment fee but $400? That's usury!
Our rehersal dinner was at The Banana Deck in Cruz Bay, St. John. The dinner was very good, but even though we were only supposed to have limited drinks available to our guests to keep the bar tab manageable, they served our guests whatever they asked for and the tab ended up to be around $400 more than we had bargained for. The waitresses should have told our guests that drinks not on the menu they would have to pay for themselves, which many of our guests had already assumed. Several people ordered fancy drinks for me they they thought they were paying for but it was all charged to us at the end. Not cool.
We decided to get married legally at home beforehand to save on costs (that alone saved us almost $600) and prevent possible headaches from paperwork getting lost in transit, etc. The coordinator we used for the wedding, Ceremonies of St. John, provided us the minister and the wedding permit and did nothing else (though she did show up), yet charged us the full price of her vow renewal package, which was supposed to include transportation for the bride and groom (we ended up using our rental car). If I had known better I would have booked the minister myself and gotten the permit myself and saved another bundle of money. I asked her for recommendations on welcome dinner venues and other things which she did give after my prompting. I guess I just expected that she would have been more involved and helpful. Maybe she could have advised me against booking those ill-fated nails and hair appointment. Any native islander would have known that was a bad idea and should have steered me clear of that.
Another UGLY was the behavior of some of my husband's family. His sister did nothing but complain the whole time, and his mother refused to eat at our welcome dinner because she hadn't picked the restaurant and didn't think anything on the menu was worthy of eating. Sigh.
All in all, if I could do it all again, I's still do the destination wedding on St. John, only I'd pick a different time of year to go, I would have INSISTED that my finace be more involved in the planning (I did almost everything on my own), and I would have verified the costs of everything with my vendors more throroghly and gotten more things in writing beforehand to avoid unpleasant suprises.
I did have a good time... but the bad things overshadowed the good times a little despite my best efforts to not let them affect me. My husband is so upset that he swears he'll never go back to St John ever again, which, since it was really my idea to go there in the first place, really hurts.