Kimeka Campbell

Review of Magdalena Grand Beach & Golf R...

I got married on February 2nd at the Magdalena Gra...

I got married on February 2nd at the Magdalena Grand in Tobago West Indies. I had such a great time, and such a bad time as well. Take a page out of my book and DON'T do some of the following things that I did if you are planning a destination wedding. First, go through a destination planning business, even if it costs more money. Second, know that the hotel may offer you vendors, like a wedding planner to use, but this may not always be the best course of action, even if they have worked with the hotel before. My case was a bit unfortunate.

First, this hotel is actually really nice. We had a few issues, but nothing that was not resolved rather quickly. For example, we had an issue with the tub in our honeymoon sweet, that was fixed within the hour. Room Service was great. Anything we called for we received. The service industry in Trinidad and Tobago is quite terrible, but for the meanwhile, the staff at the Magdalena makes you forget about this. We stayed from Monday night until Thursday. Our wedding was on Tuesday. The person who made our time there exceptional awesome was Carineh Deokiesingh. She is a joy and a delight. She made our wedding day amazing and our stay even more amazing by getting us some special perks for our wedding. She dealt with all my pre-wedding jitters with grace and was just an amazing person. She is really the picture of perfect hospitality.

On to the wedding. The day was so beautiful. The weather was perfect. We had a lovely day, thanks to Carineh. She was there to help with a lot of details that wedding planner, Therese Chung Waldropt, completely missed. There were a few issues with the ballroom when we got to the reception. The staff there was exceptionally unpleasant, especially the manager that was on staff that night. She made everything more difficult and was unhelpful. The dance floor was a terrible mess. It broke apart while we were dancing causing a hazard. I told the general manager about this when I saw him a few days later and he kind of shrugged like it was not a big deal. But it was. Three people hurt themselves, and this could be an issue for the hotel in the future. My uncle actually told the folks putting the dance floor together earlier that day about the hazard of the poorly constructed dance floor, and again, they kind of shrugged like there was nothing that they could do. They also kept turning the lights up on us during the reception totally ruining the mood and making people think they had to leave even though we pay for the place until midnight. Again, when asked about this, the staff shrugged and didn't really listen to us. We told Carineh all about this, and she was lovely about it and apologized. At that point, there was not much that could be done.

The absolute worst part of our wedding was the alleged wedding planner that Carineh suggested to us. Therese Chung Waldropt. I feel so bad trying to write this review because I really liked her as a person, but she is not the greatest wedding planner. And this really is not a reflection on Carineh either, just a series of unfortunate events. First, I don't think she has every planned a destination wedding before, something that I should have asked her, which was totally my fault. She assured me, however, that that she could handle all the tasks that I asked her to do. It turns out, she just wanted the money. She caused me so much stress. She was an over communicator which at first I thought was a good thing. But she has a severe problem with lying. She told me that she was getting my flowers for the reception from Italy. When we got there, she barely had any flowers anywhere at all, and they still had the price tags from a store in Trinidad. She charged me a lot of money to decorate, and when I got there, she had hardly done anything at all to the ceremony site or to the ballroom. Her day of coordination was God awful. Everyone complained about her. Worst of all, I hired her to do three events for my family as this was a destination wedding and folks were coming from out of town. Big mistake!