Quick Review:
I would not recommend this venue unless you are paying for a full wedding planner who can deal with the venue when they don't respond. If you do book this venue because of the beautiful location make sure you stay on top of them with your emails and phone calls.
Detailed Review:
Let's start with the positives:
The venue is beautiful, if you want an outdoor wedding and reception this was perfect. If you love Silver Falls you will be able to go and take wedding photos at the falls this is a good venue for that. Their catering was good. The rooms were decent for cabins and it was really fun to hang out around the campfire with our closest friends and family after the reception wrapped up.
Now onto the cons:
You have to pay for a certain number of rooms for the night of the wedding. The coordination of the cabins was a nightmare, you have to assign each one before people can call can reserve their rooms, or you have to put them on a purchase and have them pay you. With everything else going on with planning a wedding this was a lot more to juggle, though from our experience doing everything on the purchase was easier as long as you trust that your guests will pay you or you are ok covering the cost.
I said the food was good, but I was disappointed with how the price increased from when we were quoted to when we had to finalize everything for our wedding. Over all they added more options, but it was just more added cost only 1-2 months before the wedding. Also they only have beer and wine, not really a con for us but might be for some. The soda's are included in the bar tab and they will try to get you to do "bottomless beverages" for the non alcoholic which is like punch, iced tea and virgin mojito, unless you know your guests will really drink this go with a by consumption amount for these, it cost us about half of what they would have charged us as the bottomless (reception of less than 90 people)
The communication was great during the quote process, they got back to us quickly and answered questions promptly. This quickly fell off after we signed our paperwork. For our 6 month meeting they had changed up coordinators and it took emailing the general info email to get someone to schedule it with us. At this meeting we were told that the "day of coordinator" was really a "catering coordinator" (heads up I see a few places on the internet that still say they provide a day of coordinator they DO NOT). Things seemed ok at this point, but they changed up the coordinators again before the 2 month meeting. These two meetings were essentially repeats of each other and after the 2 month meeting it took a month for them to send us the updated estimate with the new catering prices. This left us about 4 weeks to work out all the kinks, which probably would have been fine if they had responded to our first email promptly but it took a week and a half to answer our email and that was after calling and emailing the main info email which got the attention of someone higher up. We were still trying to get everything nailed down the day before we had to pay (2 weeks prior to the wedding). Because of all this hassle we did get the dance floor comped and the original quoted price for our sparkling toast ($4 a glass vs $6... more on that later). They also gave us some banquet tables for the bridal party instead of the picnic tables.
I did find out from some of my friends turned decorators that they banquet table for the bridal party and +1s didn't have chairs until they asked, and when I arrived there were only 10 chairs when I specifically asked for 14 during the finalization phase and they said that wouldn't be a problem. The hand passed sparkling toasts were really disappointing, like maybe a ¼ to 1/2 of a glass full (1-3 sips maybe) for each glass (these they are charging $4 a glass for...) I was also disappointed that they started cleaning everything up rather early it was only like 8-9 pm so they were cleaning up more than an hour before the end of their service.
A few little other irksome things: getting ready room was underwhelming, they provided little hand mirrors and one large mirror, but my bridesmaids used the bathroom for most of their final touches. There was no getting ready space for the boys until 1 pm. We were unable to do a rehearsal onsite until the day of.
Overview:
Overall this was a beautiful venue, the food was good and the catering staff was nice, some even joined in the dancing. We were very underwhelmed by the "venue coordination" and only saw our coordinator a handful of times all day, which really made us wonder where she was and what she was doing when we would get her "there's an event today, I'll get back to you as soon as I can" auto replies. As I said at the beginning, I wouldn't recommend this because of the poor venue coordination and all the hassle we had dealing with them, but our wedding was beautiful and overall everything worked out. read more