Vizcaya — Hotel in Sacramento

LONG STORY SHORT Before my wedding I had a great experience with Vizcaya & staff. The week before my wedding & everything since has been sad. The entire venue was dirty & covered in layers of dust. The staff was rude & dismissive. I can’t express enough the lack of attention to detail. To top it all off the venue destroyed my bridal bouquet & spent a week lying to me about it. By the time they finally owned up to the truth & agreed to pay for a replacement I was exhausted from having to reach out multiple times to just get half an answer. At the end of the whole ordeal the venue would only pay for my replacement if my family & I agreed to sign an NDA..

I should have known something was off when my multiple emails I sent trying to confirm details the week before my wedding went unanswered. The only time I heard back from my coordinator, Kimberly, the week leading up to my wedding was her reminding us we had one last payment still.

When arriving in the bridal suite, I watched in shock as my mother & MOH had to use wet wipes to clean urine off the toilet seat & hair off the mirror. The Bridal Suite was hot, to the point that our makeup was starting to sweat off. It was impossible to find anyone, including my coordinator, to help. My photographer ended up literally hunting down someone to turn on the AC While getting dressed in my wedding gown my mother & my photographer had to pause to pick dust bunnies up off my dress NO ATTENTION TO DETAIL When I entered the reception hall I instantly noticed that 4 tables had been set up wrong. This means multiple families not sitting together. My sweetheart table was also left out as something the staff seemed to care about. After sitting at dinner for more than 15 minutes it was my MOH who finally got up & asked us if we wanted any drinks. I was also completely shocked to see the drinks that had been labeled “For Bride & Groom Only” sitting out on the bar to be consumed by literally anyone. DESTROYING MY PERSONAL PROPERTY & LYING This is the reason I am posting. Vizcaya tells you that at the end of your event to leave everything in the venue & you will pick it up the next day. When packing up the next day I noticed my bridal bouquet was missing from the pile of flowers. We went to ask an employee what happened to it. I was planning on preserving the most important flowers of my life. In addition a traditional family trinket was safety pinned into a stem of my bouquet. My BIL was told that my florist had come back to the venue & taken my bouquet. I found this odd as all the other flowers were still at the venue. A few days later I had no update so I reached out to Vizcaya again. This time they told me that my immediate family had stolen my flowers. I could not believe that for a second but again reached out to my family No one had it. I reached back out to the venue & this time they told me they had found only my trinket. Not the flowers it was attached to but at least it was something. When I went to the venue to pick it up, I saw it had been cut off of the bouquet as the ribbon it was on was also missing. Confused, I asked if anyone had the whole story as none of this made sense to me. After more days of no updates I reached back out & got told they were “working on it”. At this point I was super frustrated & asked to speak to a supervisor. The request to speak to a higher up was denied but they instantly had an answer for me. The venue had thrown out my bridal bouquet. It still didn't make sense to me but I accepted the “answer” & asked them to pay for a replacement. They agreed to pay for the replacement & said they would issue the check while I was on my honeymoon. Imagine my surprise when I came home & saw that issuing my check was contingent on me signing an NDA. This venue & their staff make you feel like the most important person in the world during the planning process. However, as soon as they cash your final payment they could not care less about you...

We had our wedding at Vizcaya in May of this year and were very excited leading up to the event. Unfortunately, our onsite coordinator dropped out the day before the wedding without any notice to us, and we found this out during our rehearsal 24 hrs before the wedding. As you can imagine, this caused a lot of stress leading up to the event and had a ripple effect that impacted the wedding day in many different ways. The team that took over did their best to play catch up and help us execute our event, but unfortunately there were a few things that really missed the mark. This was a 200 person cultural wedding with a lot of moving parts so to lose your coordinator the day before was a massive blow.

One of our new coordinators was extremely stressed out during our day and was causing undue stress and panic for our wedding parties and us (bride & groom). She was telling bridesmaids to walk at the wrong time, she was late to grab the groom for the start of the wedding, and overall had a negative impact on our day.

The next big area of frustration was the fact that the uplighting for the reception, was not setup so our entire reception hall had obnoxious overhead LED lighting that was incredibly bright and not at all the mood/ambiance we were hoping for. They were able to add them in eventually after we asked about them, but by the time they were added in dinner was finished and we were just starting the dancing. Our grand entrance does not look the way it should've (both in person and in our pictures) because the lighting was off.

The venue itself was beautiful and there were a lot of things that went well, but these three things all definitely had a really negative impact on our day.

After the wedding we were hoping to speak about what went poorly during our wedding and get some kind of refund since there were so many issues and many things where we did not get what was promised. They had one of our coordinators jump on with us to tell us they were sorry and hear us out, and then they read us a list of issues that management experienced from our side of things. This part was pretty insulting considering we had just gone through an incredibly stressful event with them and they objectively messed up in key areas, most importantly our coordinator who we had been working with for months disappeared the day before the wedding. Instead of trying to make it right they told us about the things that we did wrong. This list was ridiculous and included things like "a vendor was rude to us", "something was spilled on the floor in the reception hall", "there were extra tables we needed to setup" and "someone was smoking on the property". While I can appreciate these are inconvenient and challenges you might experience during a wedding as the venue, it was really insulting that this was brought up in contrast to the areas they fell short. It was almost as if because these things happened it balances out the fact that they messed up so badly. At the end of the call we asked to speak to management about a refund because we understood that it wasn’t up to the coordinator to decide. She said she would reach out and get back to us. It’s been almost 2 months since we met with her and we’ve followed up multiple times and gotten no response.

At this point, we're not sure if we'll ever get a response so we feel like we needed to leave a review to warn other potential couples. Vizcaya has had a lot of turnover with coordinators over the last two years (we had a total of 3 before our last one cancelled the day before and we were assigned 2 new ones). They will not honor any refunds no matter how badly they mess up and impact your special day. It seems like their management cares more about profit than their customers and that could be why the staff has such high turnover. I wouldn't want to work for that type of management either. All in all we would not recommend anyone use Vizcaya for their wedding venue because of...

I wasn’t planning on writing about my experience, but I feel that I should share as I would never recommend this venue to anyone. I am honestly so hurt with how I have been treated by Vizcaya, and I didn’t even make it to the wedding day.

Our coordinator was changed three times in the span of a year because they all left the venue, and one alluded that they were being offered higher paying jobs. The second coordinator we had highly criticized the choices we had in place and said we would look like alcoholics if we allowed everyone to take a shot at our ceremony. This was an idea we saw on Pinterest and was already set with our first coordinator, but I felt pressure to make changes because of the judgement I felt from her. We did not even get to meet the third one as our package only included three meetings and the last one was set for right before the wedding.

Unfortunately my fiancé and I have decided to seperate. I was not expecting a refund of the initial deposit, but I wanted to see if there was any way to get the other money invested back especially because my dad had put $10,000 in. In my email to cancel, I said this and was sent a cancellation form to fill out that said I would have 14 days to return otherwise I would still be held responsible for the remaining payments and had no chance of a refund. I decided not to sign it yet as at the time my ex and I were not yet 100% broken up yet, and I wanted to see if there were any chance for any refund. I have called and talked to/left messages for multiple coordinators (as they continue to leave the venue too might I add) since April of this year to see if this was still possible or if I could at least change the type of event. Even if it was a no, this is a lot of money invested and I just wanted a straight answer. I’d be so upset with myself if I found out later that I could have had an opportunity to save this and just hadn’t tried hard enough. I also had other vendors and family/friends that said I should ask because they had had experiences where other venues did something like this. Every time, they said that they will have someone else call me back to discuss details which led to me to believe there was still a chance… but nobody would ever call me back, so I would call back a few weeks later and get the same response.

The second to last time I called, I spoke to a coordinator named Alexa and she was very kind and seemed very empathetic to the situation. She said she would have the coordinator in charge of my event contact me back, but that Rachelle (our 3rd coordinator who apparently also suddenly quit) had processed our cancellation even without my signed form. Again this isn’t a no… this had my hopes up. I called yesterday to speak to her again because nobody had called me back, and I got the same answer but it felt less empathetic and at some point she even asked what would lead me to believe that there was any possibility of saving this. Tbh that kinda broke me and led me to leave this review. Someone could have just said no in the beginning if it wasn’t possible instead of saying someone would call me back to talk details. I keep being told maybe so why would I just shrug that off? I don’t think they’re going to call me back which sucks because weddings are so expensive and not everyone was given a savings for this. For us, this was the thing I worked overtime at multiple jobs to save up for a perfect day and now any salvaging it has been ruined. I’ve cried for months stressed over this and it doesn’t seem like they even care. If I were to host another event there, I would have needed time to plan. Hopefully they can get their employee retention up and work on their communication, but I will NEVER recommend this...