DestinationWeddingsReviews of destinationweddings.com

Stay Away!! Wedding postponed due to covid-19.DestinationWeddings.com WOULD NOT REFUND MONEY. Every other travel vendor I’ve dealt with has refunded insurance or not. They are heartless and very unresponsive. Once they get your money, you never hear back from them. Bandits!!

We used DestinationWeddings for our 1/2020 wedding. Our specialist, Jenni Parks, was consistently unresponsive, unprofessional and underhanded. Her lack of responsiveness to several of our guests forced guests to book outside of our room block. Jenni always had an excuse for her slow replies (she saw someone die in a car accident, there was a delay from the hotel, she is in the middle of a divorce to name a few). From the 1st conversation, Jenni told us she would take care of our room block and that there was nothing we needed to worry about. There were several phone conversations with Jenni regarding her ability to work the system when it came to our room block and for us not to worry. Fast forward to 2 weeks before our wedding and there were still 9 rooms left on our room block that Jenni never canceled and the hotel wanted us to pay for. DestinationWeddings "compromised" with us when we finally contacted management and instead of us paying $21,000, we were told that they would apply our deposit to our room, but that we were no longer eligible for any perks (i.e free room nights and $ back for our room). It is a total scam. DestinationWeddings is probably in cahoots with the hotels and finds ways to avoid awarding couples the perks that are dangled in front of them when initially signing their contract. What should have been an exciting time in our lives turned into a stressful and much more expensive endeavor than anticipated. Save yourselves...book your room block yourself and avoid this disreputable company.

Working with Dyvonne Willis and Destination Weddings was the single worst experience we had, not just with our wedding planning, but likely in our entire personal and professional lives. They exhibited a lack of professional integrity, extremely poor communication practices (at times 6-10 days for a simple reply), and a consistent pattern of providing us with wrongful information or entirely getting the logistics of our guests travel wrong. Not only was there a pattern of incompetence, but there was also a pattern of bad customer service. We had to escalate issues several times, including all the way to the CEO, John Walsh, only to be met at times with a lack of empathy and support. We requested a new agent multiple times, since Dyvonne Willis had proven to be incapable of delivering results with integrity and care, and we were turned down each time. We felt we were constantly having to do their job for them, or double check all of their work given the number of mistakes and inconsistencies. Even with that, there were still more issues with our guest travel than if they had booked independently without Destination Weddings. By the time our wedding arrived, our relationship with Dyvonne and Destination Weddings was at a breaking point, and when issues arrived day-of, they were not readily available to help troubleshoot. Instead, we had to wait on a general customer service line for over an hour to resolve our guests issues. This is not exactly how we had imagined spending part of our wedding weekend. Save yourself the heartache and work with another travel agency or directly with a resort.

We just got back from our trip using this service, and I would not recommend using them. If you have a standard 1 week vacation and your entire group does the exact same thing it might be a bit better... but any change and things go downhill quickly. We have family from all over and it was a nightmare getting them to use this service. We were quoted $150 from destinationweddings for a one way shuttle for a family member that was arriving at a slightly different time, and we found a $18 shuttle from expedia. The excursions were way over priced for what you could find elsewhere, and was a nightmare to book through the site. For the actual wedding planning it was done all through the resort which was amazing, but destination weddings played no part in that short of telling us who to email. Our agent was absent, and had constant issues with our families trying to book flights from the states and elsewhere in Canada. Our trip would have been much better all around if we just went to a travel agent and had them plan the trip and we dealt directly with the resort for the wedding. Stay away from this service, its not worth the hassle. Edit: As you can see, it took them 6 months to reply to this, and we heard nothing from their "internal actions". Take my advice. Avoid this service.

My experience with Destination Weddings has been awful. I felt like once I booked the wedding and resort everything just went down hill. I was told that I would not have to deal with my guests questions or concerns that I should direct them all to my travel agent. Well I would say 75% of my guests ended up calling me and complaining to me that they didn't know what to do, they were not getting any response from the travel agent (emails and phone calls not being returned). I had guests booking elsewhere (which hurts us cause the more that book with our travel agent the more perks or money off we get) and some did not book at all because they got frustrated with the process and gave up. My travel agent was constantly "out of office" for a week at a time at DW conferences and unavailable during that time to my guests unless I called almost in tears from stress over this. Both time payments were due for my guests and they had questions she was "out of office", so my guests would call me panicking as to what they should do, to which I of course had no answer and just became more stressed out. We asked for two beds multiple times for some of the rooms because we had male and female friends sharing rooms that sharing a bed was not appropriate for and yet they still ended up with 1 king bed when other guests got 2 beds that didn't need it. Also, the large amount of money I put down as deposit to hold room block has yet to be returned to me and we checked out of resort 8 weeks ago. Contract said 30 days. We are also owed other money back based on the amount of rooms we booked but have yet to see that either. I have had to reach out to my travel agent to ask when I can expect my money and if I got a response to any of my emails it was days or a week later, if at all. I would never reccomend this site for anyone. It has caused me tears and stress working with them and the lack of communication. My guests even told me they were given an attitude from our travel agent.

It's stressful enough planning a wedding, let alone a vacation for 60+ of your closest family and friends. Which is why we decided to use so-called 'experts' destinationweddings.com to alleviate/put at arms length some of the stress and awkwardness of handling the travel bookings. Using destinationweddings.com would come to be our ONLY regret. From the start, our guests complained to us about being unable to reach our DW representative, Ingrid. It was a red flag, and exactly what I DIDN'T want to happen - me having to intervene on several bookings to get answers. But at that point, we had already left our deposit, sent out our invites...No turning back. I did my best to pick up the slack by giving ur guests all the information they needed - which sections they could book in, pricing etc. because Ingrid was not conveying the information herself. We specifically picked a resort that had an 'Adults Only' and a 'Family Section' to accommodate the preferences of our diverse group of guests, and with great effort and several emails back and forth, I implored her to please give our guests these options and prices before they finalized their bookings. She agreed to, but I would learn the hard way that this did not occur... One month out from the wedding, when my fiance and I got our travel documents by email, there was no mention of 'Adults Only' section on our paperwork. I immediately wrote to Ingrid, asking if she consciously hadn't put us in that section (despite the fact that we asked) because we would already qualify for an upgrade, being the wedding couple... Not the case...Our wedding perks would have only given us a nicer 'family section' room. So we paid extra to upgrade, which was well above our original booking rate because our quote had already expired by then. Fast forward to 24-hours before travel, I started receiving panicked calls and messages from several of our guests that when they tried to check in for the flight, but they were paired with a complete stranger on their booking. Luckily, we recognized the 'strangers' as other guests of ours, but it was embarrassing none-the-less that the couples and families were not listed together. I'm not sure if this was an error on the part of Destination Weddings or our Tour operator 'Air Transat'. Either way, we were not off to a good start... The day we arrived at the resort, the incompetency of DestinationWeddings.com came to a head. We had just put our bags down in our room when we were called down to the front lobby, where several furious guests were complaining to hotel staff about being in the wrong section (ie. not the adults only section, as they thought they had booked). It turns out, Ingrid hadn't even given them the option of booking in Adults Only. We got her on the phone, and she was no help, so we had to barter with the hotel directly to negotiate an upgrade price for those willing to pay (which once again, was WELL above our original quoted rate for AO). I started my destination wedding, crying my eyes out in the lobby of our hotel, MORTIFIED that my guests received such poor service from a company I selected and told them they could trust. I wish our trouble with DestinationWeddings.com ended there...After our guests left, my now husband and I had booked our 'honeymoon' through DestinationWeddings.Com at a different resort (same tour operator) for a change of scenery. We checked out of our wedding resort and found our local travel rep to find out what time our shuttle/transport to the next resort would arrive. There was no shuttle or any transportation arranged by DestinationWeddings.com. We'd have to find our own way. So we paid for our own $45 cab. We arrived at the new resort where they were surprised to learn it was our honeymoon. I mean, COME ON? We negotiated with the hotel to add a 'honeymoon' package to our room - after they had already tried to upsell us on a better section of the resort because, surprise, surprise, we were booked in the lowest-class section of the resort, having been given NO other options by our DestinationWeddings.Com agent, Ingrid. Boasted as a 'free planning service', you could say that 'you get what you pay for' with DestinationWeddings.com, but as I suspected early on - NOTHING in this world is free. I asked our agent early on in the process how their fee structure works because I wanted to be fair! She SHOULD get paid for having to deal with my relatives...I just didn't want their hidden fee coming out of my guests pockets! She avoided the question, so I tried my best to reverse engineer how they get their fee. When I looked at the 'group booking' perks that were offered directly by our tour operator 'Air Transat', we would have received '1 free passenger' for every 10 booked, to a maximum of 4 (I think per departure city, which we had 2 different departure cities). With DestinationWeddings, they passed along the savings of 3 passengers, so they essentially made their money by taking '1-2 free passenger' reimbursements, plus any other amounts they negotiated directly with hotels/service providers. Anyways, it didn't come out of my guests pockets, so that was fine, and I was fine 'paying' for work that had been done, but as a paying customer, I cannot stress enough how disappointed we were with this service. There was absolutely no care, consideration or pride in the work. If you are a bride considering booking your wedding trip through DestinationWeddings, not only do I NOT RECOMMEND, I strongly dissuade you from using DestinationWeddings.com.

Having your destination wedding but don’t know where to start? Has the stress gotten to you that when you search, destinationwedding.com pops up & the promise of a great wedding just makes everything seems so easy? Please don’t use this company. You and your family will save a ton of money if you just do your own research. My boyfriend’s cousin is getting married in 2019, the wedding planner sends everyone an email blast welcoming the newly engaged couple. Pretty awesome! Wedding planner was very quick to email me back at first. She also promised to pricematch. Her price was $1760 and the lower price I found was $1705. She didn’t want to match it. I’m in luck because the wedding is a year away and I’m now searching for better deals and have found one as low as $966 on another site. Thank you destinationwedding for declining my pricematch.