We pretty much knew before we were even engaged that we wanted to have a destination wedding ... but we had no idea what destination ... much less what resort or venue.
In a previous post I wrote about all of our destination options and to re-cap that a bit:
Things we've taken into consideration while looking for the perfect destination and venue:
- Our family is mostly all in California
- We will be traveling with 5 kids
- We will be traveling during summer vacation from school
- We don't know yet if we'll be able to get passports for all of the kids (there's a story for this one *sigh*)
- We want to be married on the beach - on the sand if possible
- We're working with a fairly low wedding budget (considering we'll be paying for travel and accommodations for 7 of us)
- We need to be careful about the travel time involved so none of us waste our vacation time in planes and airports
Places that we put on our "maybe" list right away:
- San Diego (North County)
- Santa Barbara
- Hawaii
- Mexico
- Antigua
- U.S. Virgin Islands
- Texas Hill Country
In that post I go into how we decided that we'd like to get married in Mexico but finding a city and venue was another challenge altogether.
I spent literally all day every day (drove Ken crazy! LOL) scouring the internet looking for information ... the good and the bad ... in hopes of finding the destination of our dreams. I spent time on Trip Advisor (warning: I think more people with a negative experience are more apt to come back and submit their review here) and I found some great destination wedding forums with my favorite being http://www.bestdestinationwedding.com/forum/.
I knew early on that I really wanted an all-inclusive resort so that we didn't have to stress about the cost of our food and drinks (keep in mind we're taking our 5 kids ... ages 7 - 13). The more I read the more I was convinced that I would be happiest with a resort that had "wedding packages" as I thought that would make it pretty easy to put the details together. With all this in mind I narrowed it down to RIU Resorts and Dreams Resorts.
I started spending my time reading their websites and any bridal reviews I could find and eventually I found my dream resort ... Dreams Tulum.
After this decision ... it was time to start pricing it all out and finding out if they had an opening on their calendar for our wedding. We'll see ...
Are you in the process of choosing your wedding site/venue? What are your must have's? If you've already narrowed down or chosen your venue give us some tips and pointers! *SmiLes* Suzanne

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Attention April/May Dreams Cancun Brides!!!!!
You may be in for a surprise if you have an upcoming wedding at this resort. We have just returned from our wedding on Apr 10. Let us start by saying our friends and family would all consider us very laid back people and very low maintenance.
We picked this wedding site a year ago, and even traveled to Dreams 6 months ago to check the locale out. We specifically asked at that time if there would be and construction/changes planned. Answer was no. When we arrived at the resort, we were upgraded to a towers room. However, the room overlooked the disastrous construction site where our special day was to take place. Our gazebo had been torn down!! Yes, the beautiful gazebo that is still up on the website is now gone. There was a huge blue tarp covering the now construction zone known as our wedding site. In addition, the beautiful surrounding area had changed. There were several hundred yards of huge concrete blocks with rebar sticking out, forming a new jetty that was quite unnatural appearing. The private adjacent beach where our reception was to be held was completely redone and built up so that it was not quite so private and communicated with the other resorts. Again, no planned changes as they told us. We immediately had a meeting with several managers (bride in tears of course). When I asked why they had withheld all of this information, they claimed it had all been done only 5 days prior. This was later found to be a complete lie as the local photographer who is at the resort 3-4 days weekly told me positively that it had been 25-26 days for the gazebo, much longer for the new jetty. We demanded that other arrangements be made as the bride would be wearing high heels and a beach wedding was not what we had been planning for a year. We ultimately decided to have our wedding at a sister resort (Now Resort) which was about a 45 min drive south. They provided a charter bus to transport our 50 guests. The wedding was nice there, although not what we had planned for so long and not what we were planning to bring our family/friends from another country to see. We proceeded to have meetings every other day or so with the wedding planner (Cecilia who was pretty good) and her boss (Rafael who was not so honest about timing of gazebo construction). As one can imagine, this made for a pretty stressful week prior to our wedding. One of the meetings was the day of the wedding, and finally another several days after. At each meeting was what we considered an insulting small discount on our botched wedding. In the meantime as our guests arrived, almost every guest was told at the desk that there were no rooms available for them. Some of them were upgraded after putting up a fuss in order to get a room. Many of them were not so fortunate and had to be put up in other hotels. The grooms own mother was not even staying at Dreams on our wedding day!
We finally had our room relocated away from the construction site reminder and were placed back near the dolphins. In the end, we paid a portion of our initial wedding bill. We were not offered a return voucher stay in the future even though we inquired about it several times. Overall the experience was quite traumatic. We felt they were intentionally deceitful before we arrived, then lied to our faces directly, and ultimately gave very little to zero effort to attempt to make up for it or try to make us feel happy or special in any way. We do not plan a trip back at this point, nor do we recommend to others for vacation or especially for a wedding. We are happy we are married but quite happy that our experience at Dreams Cancun is over. On a positive note, the food was overall pretty good across the resort. Also, the photographer and videographer were awesome and provided a great video and over 600 great pictures. But if you are expecting more than pictures and food for that special day of your life, you may rethink your options as it’s not too late.