Absolutely horrendous wedding venue, avoid!
My fiancé and I booked Berwick House for our wedding in summer 2023 for a spring 2024 wedding. We loved the venue when we were first shown round, and loved the idea of being able to stay with our guests in one place. In their own words, it was ‘our house for the weekend’.
But then, with around 6 weeks to go until our wedding, Berwick called us to let us know that a fire officer had inspected the property and found it to be non compliant with fire safety regulations, and that none of our guests would be able to stay overnight as we had booked 8 months previously.
We later found out that the venue had been served a Fire Prohibition notice. We were shocked at how a newly renovated venue could have been hosting guests without complying with the necessary regulations with regard to fire and safety.
Now - we (and our family and friends) would expect that any venue that cancels accommodation for nearly 40 guests on such short notice to be pulling out all the stops and bending over backwards to help customers in this situation. Instead, we found BH to be slow, incompetent and uncaring. They suggested multiple times that they could just cancel the accommodation booking completely and allow us to hire the venue for the day, leaving us to sort out alternative accommodation, and transportation to and from the venue, for guests ourselves with weeks to go. We told them this was not acceptable and that they needed to sort out appropriate alternatives.
To make matters even worse, we felt that at the same time as not sorting out appropriate alternative accommodation, they were also trying to get more money out of us by strongly leaning on us to use their in house bar. This was despite the fact that when we signed for the venue, there was no in house bar service, and we were told to arrange our own bar. We subsequently arranged for our caterers to run the bar, and informed BH about this 4
months previously. However, they kept making weak excuses about licensing even when both we and our caterer explained to them that the licence the caterers had would be sufficient. We saw this as an attempt by them to try and make up for some of the losses that they had incurred by not being able to let out their rooms (due to their lack of compliance with fire regulations). This made us extremely untrusting of them, as if they were trying things like this 6 weeks before the big day, what other surprises would they have for us to try and get a bit more money?
The final straw was the director of the company’s treatment of my fiancé. She had informed them about a surprise that she had planned for me on the day, as she needed their assistance in planning it. The director of the company then proceeded to tell me what the surprise was in the middle of a meeting with them. My fiancé was extremely upset, but we got no proper apology - instead the director the company commented on how ‘emotional’ she was being. Perhaps if he had not ruined a surprise that she had for her future husband she wouldn’t be so upset!
We ended up having to find a new venue just 5 weeks before our wedding day because of BH’s inability to provide anything near to the exclusive experience that they had sold us 9 months ago. We were not offered any compensation whatsoever despite the fact that their lack of compliance with fire regulations and all round incompetence caused us huge amounts of stress, upset, and inconvenience.
Overall, awful experience. Beautiful building which was the reason we signed there in the first place. But we found the owners to be rude, uncaring, and have no experience in running events. We also felt that they were trying to squeeze us for every penny to help cover their losses.
Wouldn’t...
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