Hey ladies,
So I'll try to make this as short as possible. We were married in Sept 2014. When we booked the date back in January 2014, we were told we had to pay 50% of our package as a deposit by either cheque or credit card. We sent in a cheque in February 2014. We noticed it wasn't cashed right away, so I called the venue to make sure they had got it. They did, promised they'd cash it, all was well.
After the wedding, we were checking our of the venue the next day and were told we owed them almost $1000 still. We were very confused, since we paid the other 50% of our agreed contract 30 days before the wedding, as instructed. They insisted they didn't cash our original check (the 2nd deposit was paid by credit card), and called the wedding coordinator our for us to talk to. He said they didn't accept personal cheques, and that it was just to secure the date and that payment was always due after the wedding. I had the original email saying they accepted them, which he said was an error and that he was 100% sure it was never cashed. This was against what our contract said, but he showed me our payment sheet from the venue and it only showed the payment made 30 days before the wedding. We tried to look on our bank statements online but the mobile site wouldn't go that far back, and there were so many vendor cheques to go through that we agreed that since we hadn't seen it cashed originally, they were right and we paid the first deposit amount before we checked out.
Flash forward to tonight- we just saw a credit for the deposit go onto H's credit card. Almost a full year after our wedding, and way over a year since they cashed that original cheque. They didn't contact us in any way to say that hey, we realized we were wrong and DID cash that cheque, so here is a refund. We went back through bank statements and found that original cheque was cashed back in March of 2014.
Obviously we missed it too and could have followed up, but with all of the payments going out of our account and being on our honeymoon, it honestly never came back up. But I'm pretty upset that we weren't contacted when they discovered this error, and while I'm very happy they refunded us the deposit money, I feel that a phone call or email was owed to us. Did they honestly think we'd just be all oh cool, an almost $1000 credit from the wedding venue, how nice!
I'm going to email our coordinator/the manager/the sales person we had been in contact with and ask them what happened, but I'm not really sure what to say in the email. I don't want to go into this email being rude, but we're both pretty upset that they didn't try to contact us to let us know they realized that we were right that whole time. It was really stressful when we had to pay that extra money the day after the wedding, because we had hotel reservations and other wedding/honeymoon payments coming off of our credit cards and had to so some juggling around to figure out which card it could go on without messing up another vendor's payment at the same time. It was embarrassing and not the best way to deal with leaving our wedding venue.
If this was your venue, what would you say/ask?
TTDR: Our wedding venue just refunded us our original deposit from our wedding a year ago, that was paid for by a cheque that they insisted they never cashed/made us pay via credit card the day after the wedding. They haven't contacted us at all, and I want an explanation of what happened/why they didn't contact us in any way when they realized they owed us almost $1000. WWYD?