Event Cinemas Macquarie — Local services in Sydney

We had an absolutely awful experience and this is not the first time. We arrived at the Gold Class cinema prior to the movie starting to purchase food and drinks for the duration of the movie. We paid $150 for one couple for food and drinks along with another $60 for the other couple. This is not including the price of the movie tickets.

The male serving us informed us that we would be receiving our food and drinks at the first half of the movie (first 30 minutes) and our deserts during the second half.

After over 1 hour into the movie, we had only recieved our drinks without our mains. We asked the employees if our food was coming and they said “we will check”, after another 20 minutes we still did not have any food. Keep in mind, everyone around us and their mains and deserts by this point. After following up with employees another 3 times, finally a few of our mains came 1hr 30mins into the movie, but the movie is only 1hr 50mins long. This was quite disappointing.

Myself and my partner actually had to ask to cancel the order as it was nearing the end of the movie and we had only recieved 1/3 food items. The man informed us that “they couldn’t find our orders” and that “we were entitled to a refund of our order and to find him after the movie”.

The desserts were brought out to us with 5 minutes of the movie remaining.

Once the movie ended, we waited to find the man who said we were entitled to a refund but he was no where to be found.

In summary we paid for food that we did not recieve and did not get a refund or any sort of...

Event cinema Macquarie is one of the chains flagship complexes. It's recently refurbed its candy bar and box office operations so you can now DIY ticket purchases with checkout style candy purchases. On average the cinemas are clean though there's room for improvement, and ditto for the bathrooms. Event Macquarie has both gold class and a revival of its old silver screen offering, with the latter now a premium offering with partial or full reclining seats for an extra fee. However we note the rival Reading cinemas chain has these silver screen features as standard and at a lower adult ticket price. Coffee at Macquarie is good value at 3.30 for a medium (beating the price of other event cinemas by up to a dollar or more for the same product). Ticket prices are standard across the cinema chain, though we note there are now so many partner deals (such as cheap tickets through food outlets when you buy a meal or via your phone provider) it's almost silly to buy direct from the cinema.

We hope to see improvements in availability in food and drink at Macquarie in 2020 such that service stops at the time the final session commences and not before hand.

Update April 2022: alas the service of coffee and other beverages at the bar still ends by 8pm which is very disappointing and one must go outside the cinemas to get coffee. This of course is made awkward when the no external food or drink...

I wonder if management has changed hands over the past few years as the quality of the facilities and overall hygiene of the place have drastically gone downhill. In the women’s bathroom half the stalls have out of order signs on them and the half of the remaining ones are too dirty to use. The toilet paper holders are broken with large shards of plastic missing, and the one I used wasn’t bolted to the wall which I found out when I went to use it and it sliced my finger open on said broken shard. I asked staff for a first aid kit and first they didn’t know where it was and then panicked when they saw my finger and asked if I needed the manager - no, just a Band-Aid, I said. Ended up finding one at the bottom of my handbag before they came back.

Seats D3 and D4 are broken in GC cinema 1 (have been all year, maybe longer) and as someone in a previous review stated, you’re right next to the kitchens with the doors left open the whole movie for the outside light and noise to distract you from your movie experience. Not what you expect considering the price of GC seats.

They also refuse you to use cash when ordering food and drink in the GC lounge which seems illegal as it is legal Australian tender??? When asked what time of day they stop accepting cash, staff stated “I don’t know, I’ve been working here two years and they haven’t accepted it while...