Kuoni Wedding Review - San Francisco 22/9/06 (Kuoni Travel)

Member Name: susanevans

Product:	Kuoni Travel
Date:	15/11/06 (358 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hassle Free, Flexible, Choice of locations, Good Wedding Co-ordinator.

Disadvantages: Not being able to know for sure if the wedding location you have chosen is the best one.

Kuoni Wedding - San Francisco 22/9/06
This is similar to the other review relating to Kuoni Travel: The Big Day, in which my husband and I decided to get married abroad and chose San Francisco as our destination. We chose Kuoni primarily because it had a variety of wedding locations to choose from. Would have preferred Virgin, but they only had one location outside San Fran.

Kouni
Booked by phone, overall found there were no signicant problems with the booking or the paperwork we received.

I did return my completed evaluation form with a wedding photo, to claim my free bottle of bubbly, which I am still waiting for......


Wedding Location
Similar to the other review, we also chose the Japanese Tea Garden, having spent a lot of time thinking about it. We were very disappointed to hear it was not the one we thought it was in Golden Gate Park.Instead it located in San Mateo. Nevertheless it wasn't a problem to choose somewhere else, as we thought we may have a problem with transporting our guests back from San Mateo on the day. The wedding coordinator said she was completely flexible right up to the day of the wedding for us to chose our location, which was a good thing as we chose our location 2 days prior to the wedding. We were torn between Palace of Fine Arts and the Palace of Legion of Honor. The Palace of Fine Arts had a fence round it, as work was being done on it, but the coordinator said that we could still get inside it. When we went to see Palace of Fine Arts upon arrival in San Fran, it was absolutely gorgeous,but the fence was a real disappointment and couldn't stand on the grass, so we decided on the Palace of Legion of Honor.

Wedding co-ordinator
I found the wedding co-ordinator very good. She was in contact with us regularly prior to the wedding,both by email and phone, and she offered to phone us back in the UK. She did a lot of running about for us, even to the Palace of Fine Arts to see if the fence had been taken down. She even offered to pick us up from the airport when we arrived and take us to various locations to allow us to chose our location. She organised my hair appt and husband's old fashion barbers for an old fashion shave. We were therefore really disappointed that something came up and she couldn't actually perform our ceremony on the day,but her assistant would do this for us, who we felt did a great job!

Wedding Day.
The location at the Palace of Legion of Honor was amazing, and not one we had seen on our previous visit there. We got married on a wooden platform overlooking golden gate bridge and the marin headlines and the weather was glorious sunshine about 75 degrees. Similar to the other review, we spent quite a bit of time deciding on where to stand,which I would have preferred done for me in advance.

The coordinator had wrote the ceremony for us and us adding and deleting bits we liked or not. The ceremony did feel very personal to us,but would have liked more choice of poems, but I couldn't find many myself on the web.

I didn't feel we were rushed in any way after the ceremony. We spent a lot of time chatting to each other and having photos taken and drinking champagne.

The only down side of the day, was it was slightly windy,and my hair, which had been set in curls, did not last one bit, and my hair was a mess.

As there were 6 in the wedding party, we decided to hire a limo, so we wouldn't have any problems with taxi-ing our guests around, plus we also went on a 3 hr sight seeing trip drinking champagne, and stopping at the golden gate bridge, coit tower and Palace of Fine Arts for more "non professional" wedding photos.

Photographer
On a whole, the photographer was very good, and gave us a CD of all the photos she had taken of us, including the duff ones. At the beginning, I felt there was little direction on what poses she wanted to take of us, but it worked out well in the end.

Rest of trip
We started our trip flying to Seattle (Crown Plaza), followed by San Fran (Argent) and our Wedding, followed by San Diego/La Jolla (La Jolla at the Shores).

Overall, the trip was fantastic. Felt that the Argent Hotel was the best hotel we stayed at.

Summary: We had the most fabulous wedding day ever.