Southwest Airlines: A We had never flown Southwest before but we to give it a shot. We drove from northern Ontario to Buffalo for our flight. Southwest was so much cheaper than Air Canada or Westjet out of Toronto so it was a no brainer for us (Buffalo is about a 2 hour drive past Toronto) plus we wouldn’t have to go through customs when we landed in the States, as we would be driving through the border. Our flight was early 7am and we paid the $10 earlybird checkin fee – I was worried about having a spot to put my dress in the overhead bins. We were A31 & 32. Perfect. Flight was good, no problems with luggage and arrived in Vegas a half hour early. On the way home, we skipped early bird and were B3 & 4. Excellent. Good seats – flight was on time, no problems with luggage and our male flight attendant was hilarious. He had me laughing out loud. I’d most definitely fly Southwest again.
New York New York : A+ We booked NYNY as a package with our Southwest flight and got a pretty good deal I think. We paid about $745 for 8 nights here. No complaints on the price. Yes there is a resort fee of $16.80 per day. I’m ok with that because we used the internet a lot. Using at least 3 devices daily. Lots of imessages to our families and other guests – saving the $0.60 per text message fee (remember I’m from Canada so using my phone in the states can cost big bucks), uploading pics and checking out maps etc. Our room was a good sized corner room on the 15th floor with a view of MGM, Tropicana & Excalibur. King size bed was comfy, not quite as comfy as PH, but close. Shower had good pressure (I have thick hair so this is important to me!), and hotel staff were absolutely fantastic. We used the bell desk a lot. And every bell man we dealt with was great. The lady that checked us in asked all about our wedding plans and was super friendly. Most of our guests stayed here too, so it was easy to meet up with our parents and other guests. Pool re-opened the day we arrived. Nothing fancy, but it looks good and cooled me off when I needed it. I would definitely stay here again and I’m pretty sure our guests would too.
Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab: A+++ Joe’s was perfect. That about sums it up. Beth was hands down my favorite person to deal with while planning (and I liked every one of my vendors). She answered all my silly questions and fast. Honestly sometimes I had a response to an email within the hour. She wasn’t around the night of our party or when we arrived to drop things off – she was on her honeymoon – so she was forgiven J. In Beth’s absence I dealt with Jessica – who was also fantastic and knew all our details when we showed up. The Gigi room was the perfect size for our 32 guests – we had originally booked it to hold about 45 so I was worried it would feel too big for our smaller crowd. Not even a little bit. We had 6 tables for dining, a cake pop/guestbook table, our DJ and a dance floor. Perfect. The food – oh my god – the food. Our guests RAVED about how good it was. All of it. “The best _______I’ve ever eaten” insert steak, salmon, crab, mashed potatoes, pie here. I had the crab cakes – they were literally all crab, I could only eat one. There is a pic of our menu in the link to pics I’ll post below. So apparently Joe’s is famous for their key lime pie. I don’t like key lime pie so I had the peanut butter pie. Holy mother of goodness. Nom. Sooo delicious. I was soo sad that I was too full to eat more than a few bites. Next time I see a Joe’s I’m going for the peanut butter pie – before the main course. The service was also phenomenal. One of my friends told me she had been sitting for an hour and a half and her wine was still at the same level because they keep refilling it – she told me she was worried about standing up! We had a male and a female host, the female was fantastic and on the ball and the male was hilarious – all of our guests loved him. We were short on the room minimum so our female host (Heidi – I’m pretty sure that was her name) suggested we send our guests home with bottles of wine. Great idea! Our guests certainly thought so – they were all so surprised and excited when we told them. Like I said Joe’s was perfect. I would change nothing. I love Joe’s. If you couldn’t tell.
DJ Godzilla – A : I loved Calvin. He was a little slow on returning emails toward the end, so I had to check up on him a couple times, but it’s wedding season and I understand he’s a busy guy, so no problem. I gave him a short list of must play songs. He played them all. My only little issue is that he played some during dinner/drinks when I meant them for the actually dancing part of the reception. This is partially my fault because I guess I didn’t specify when I wanted the songs. But I thought he might use “Start me Up” to get people on the dance floor but played it during dinner. That disappointed me but again I didn’t specify when to play them. So my advice is to do so! Calvin was great to play the songs again when asked. And he did have my guests dancing all night and that’s what I had asked him to do. Overall he was great and so sweet in person just wanted to share my “specify when to you’re your songs advice”.
Tyler Freear A : Tyler had been great via email and phone. He showed up on time and started shooting right away. He got all the little details and then we did our first look pics. He caught some great moments. The only list I gave him were for family shots, I decided to let him pick the locations for our shots down the Strip. We ended up with some beautiful shots, but looking back I think I’m wishing we had more “Vegas” shots. We have Caesar’s and Paris pics but I can’t help but feel that we could have done more. A lot of our photos, while great, could have been taken anywhere. As with Godzilla I feel like this is my fault for not specifying. I thought I wanted Tyler to pick the locations, but looking back I wish I had done the picking. At the time I was worried about running late for the reception so I wanted to get as many pics done as possible, so I didn’t want to detour. This is my only true wedding regret and it’s not Tyler’s fault at all, I should have put this in a review on myself, but it ended up here J. He had our pics up on his website in a week and our disc should arrive in one more week (again the Canada thing). Tyler caught pics of just about all our guests and I really love the reception photos – except the ones of me singing and dancing because apparently I make crazy faces while doing so! LOL. Overall he was fantastic to work with and we ended up with beautiful pictures. Here’s the link
http://tfreear.photobiz.com/cart/gallery.cfm?photoID=644671&#selectphoto
The Palette: B+ Pam was fast to respond and easy to deal with. I told her I wanted small centerpieces with hot pink gerbera daisies and hot pink roses. She gave us a good price so we went with her. She placed a courtesy call confirming delivery place and time the day before the wedding – that was appreciated. I didn’t see them delivered or set up, but they looked good and were pretty much what I pictured (I didn’t send any photo suggestions to her – I just let her do her thing). I was happy with the finished product and she comped us a bag of rose petals for the tables, I have no complaints – I just didn’t have as much interaction with her as I did with my other vendors.
Viva Las Cake Pops : A I saw these in another LV knottie’s pics and fell in love with the idea of cake pops. Jackie was really awesome and super responsive. I told her what we wanted and she delivered. And the pops looked fantastic and tasted amazing. The cake was good even a week later. We gave all our guest 2 pops and had a bunch left over – which I loved because I got to snack on them for days J. I definitely recommend Viva.
Here are some photos from our camera. Hope hte link works.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151766684010198.859111.543060197&type=1
I'm also going to post reviews of the restaurants etc where we ate that are NWR just because they were fantastic I just need a little review break right now!