Romance - Disney-style!

[AKLRULZ]

Hey gang (and especially couples),

I've got a spotlight article about touring the WDW resort as a couple in the current issue of Disbuzz and thought y'all might be interested in reading it:

http://www.disbuzz.com/index.php

If you've not had the chance to tour WDW as a couple only, I highly recommend planning a couples only trip.

Enjoy!

[jcodirewolf]

If people want to know about Disney Weddings since I've planned one, I can tell you alot about the experience.

johno

[disneydreamer58]

Hey gang (and especially couples),

I've got a spotlight article about touring the WDW resort as a couple in the current issue of Disbuzz and thought y'all might be interested in reading it:

http://www.disbuzz.com/index.php

If you've not had the chance to tour WDW as a couple only, I highly recommend planning a couples only trip.

Enjoy!

Sounds good to me, now all I have to do is find Mr. Right

[boilerbabe]

My husband and I are coming up on our 1 year anniversary, my dream wedding was always at WDW, we got married here in IN though and honeymooned at WDW. It was WONDERFUL, I would highly recommend it to everyone! We did the couple's massage at the Grand Floridian and enjoyed the restaurants. 8 nights at the Poly was not enough! The CMs treated us like royalty, we were upgraded to the concierge level/MK view room! We look back at our pictures and sigh! We'll be going back next month to celebrate our anniversary! WDW is definitely for couples too. There's so much to do there!

johno, I'd love to hear about your WDW wedding experience!!!

[AKLRULZ]

Absoultely, post about your wedding experience, johno! My wife and I honeymooed at Disney which was spectacular and we try to return every few years on a couples only trip leaving the kids behind with the grandparents! We're thinking of a vow renewal for a milestone anniversary celebration in a few years.

[boilerbabe]

My husband and I want to do vow renewal in a few year too since we didn't have a Disney wedding. I would love to do that at the Poly! Where do you think you might do that?

[jcodirewolf]

We got married May, 2005, so about 2.5 years ago. I will say they have a number of changes SINCE our experances.

But the whole thing comes down to the wedding planners seem to be very disorganized. There was no one "bad" thing that happened, but it was one of those things where we had what felt like 100's of little things go wrong.

Starting off, I called to "setup an appointment" because we knew where going to be down at WDW anyway, so we wanted to have a face to face. I called the Disney Weddings number, the conversation basicly went like this. "Hi, I'd like to set up an appointment with a wedding planner, between DATE and DATE." "Well have you gotten the DVD yet?" "Nope, but we will be down there at DATE. So we'd like to make sure we can get in to see someone." "Well we can't schedule until you have gotten the packageDVD." "Well can you tell me the availblity between those dates?" "There are plenty of people who have opening between those dates, it won't be a problem call back about a week before."

Call back a week before. "You should have called months ago, we are totaly booked, we only have N people. The people at event services that answer the number you originaly called can't see our schedules I don't know why they told you that."

Repeat the above sort of problem with the florist, and the contract, and catering, and the final attendance list. We worked though it... but it required a lot more work than we wanted to do. We wanted to have a wedding planner so we didn't have to do all the details ourselves. But we ended up doing a lot of detail work. At one point my wife broke down in tears saying "I just want to sit down and pick out flowers."

johno

[AKLRULZ]

We are actually thinking of the Grand Floridian since that is where we honeymooned, but I just had a great friend get married at the Boardwalk and the Epcot resort area is my favorite so i'm leaning towards there - and we also had friends who just did a renewal on DCL and it was amazing, too.

Too many choices!

[jcodirewolf]

My husband and I want to do vow renewal in a few year too since we didn't have a Disney wedding. I would love to do that at the Poly! Where do you think you might do that?

You can pretty much get a wedding/vow renewal anywhere you want. As long as it's not already booked. They often do things on the "beach" around the lagoon. last time I was down there they where setting up for one outside of the GF.

johno

[boilerbabe]

We are actually thinking of the Grand Floridian since that is where we honeymooned, but I just had a great friend get married at the Boardwalk and the Epcot resort area is my favorite so i'm leaning towards there - and we also had friends who just did a renewal on DCL and it was amazing, too.

I agree, there are too many choices. I'm pretty sure we'd pick the Poly. That's are absolute most fav. resort and where we honeymooned! I hope I did the quote thing right, first time I've tried that!

johno, I'm suprprised to hear the trouble you had with the Disney wedding planners, I would've thought it would be the best experience possible since it's Disney. If you had to do it over again, would you have your wedding at Disney?!

[AKLRULZ]

I'll mention that our friends who married at BWI this past year had a few hiccups with their wedding coordinator - but they requested a switch and Disney made a huge accomodation for their wedding party after the first coordinator made a pretty big snafu. One thing Disney typically does is correct their mistakes.

[jcodirewolf]

Would I do it again? That is a hard question. Because it's got two sides to it. One side is Disney is the only game in town, if you want to get married at Disney... The other side after knowing what I know now, I'd plan to spend a lot more time on the phone with them.

Like I said we both work so spending hours on the phone and e-mails back and forth to make sure everything is coming together right was not what we had planned. We tried to make it fire and forget. And it was anything but.

I was very disappointed. And was was worst was everyone kept saying they would "make it right" and they never really did for us.

johno

[boilerbabe]

Sorry to hear that! What wedding did you go with?! I know they have different packages, Cinderalla's coach etc.....

[DisBeamer]

At one point my wife broke down in tears saying "I just want to sit down and pick out flowers."

johno

That's terrible. I'm sorry you guys had a rough time of it (and they never made up for it for you guys). Hopefully it worked out to still be a good day though, even with all the extra garbage you had to deal with.

I always wanted to do a Disney wedding, but it wasn't in the cards for us. Sometime I'd like to do a vow renewal there, though. My husband keeps saying 10th anniversary. We shall see - this isn't actually the first report I've heard where the Disney event people didn't do that great a job, unfortunately.

[jcodirewolf]

Cindy's Coach...

http://www.direwolf.com/gallery/gallery ... temId=6154

I don't think any of the guests saw the problems. There were some small issues, the day of, but it was mostly stuff didn't happen as scripted there was a missed queued music, and our Wedding planner DIDN'T have the parents outside to see the coach pull up with Donna. It was a surprise to everyone, because of the expense it was always on the edge of being chopped (we didn't want to tell people we where doing it only for it not to show up.)

Afterwards, it became clear how unorganized disney was. The bill came in like 10 parts (one page from the floriest, one from the photographer, one from site...) Why they can't produce 1 or 2 pages with all the items on it I don't know but most of the pages appeared to be from the same accounting system with one or two line items per page. As far as I'm concerned there is NO reason to expose your internal departmental codes and accounting to the customer. Give me one nicely formated laser printed page with a logo, not 10 pages from your 30 year old IBM 3270 based Accounting system.

Another screw up, I got a e-mail survey about "how did I like the photography services?" My basic answer was "I don't know you got the Survey to me BEFORE you got me the pictures." By random conidence after I did the survey and basically said "I don't know" a day or two later the proof arrived at my front door via over night.

For everyone younger than me... here is the wiki about the IBM 3270 terminal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3270

johno