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Quality of service
1 out of 5 rating
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Average response time
1 out of 5 rating
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Professionalism
1 out of 5 rating
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Value
3 out of 5 rating
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Flexibility
2 out of 5 rating
Book for constant headaches
I never leave negative reviews, but after having my wedding here recently, I felt inclined to speak on my experience with Nina, the venue's owner, and to warn people about booking their wedding here. The short version is that she is a poor manager with absolutely no customer service skills and reacts with anger instead of problem solving.
Let's start with the venue itself - absolutely beautiful, but with a huge hang up. The venue is not ADA compliant at all. We had a family member with a broken ankle that our family had to CARRY up the stairs. There was a chair lift on those stairs, so when we were touring the grounds a month before, we asked the groundskeeper if it was functional and we came to find out that none of the chair lifts on the property were functional, which is a huge issue. From my understanding, a lot of the guests at the Oscar Swan are elderly, which concerns me that this place is not ADA compliant.
Secondly, during our reception in the Gathering, one of the men's bathroom stalls was out of order, which was a bummer as well. We are paying a significant amount of money for this venue, so the bathrooms should be fully functional.
Moving on to Nina, the venue's owner. Wow, there is a LOT I can say about her.
Let's start with the fact that she was incredibly disorganized and we were never given a professional contract which I recognize now is a HUGE red flag. Everything we agreed upon was written on paper and could change on a dime. She was incredibly rude and disrespectful to my mother when we were meeting with her to pay her for the food. She tried to claim that our deposit we paid her a year ago (which - by the way - was for the venue. Both the back garden and the Gathering), was simply for "being able to be in the space," and we had to pay that again, to which my mother kindly corrected her, which did NOT go over well with her.
We moved on from that and watched as she was calculating how much we owed her. There were some errors in her math that my mother, again, kindly pointed out and she became incredibly agitated and threw her hands up and scoffed. My mother - who is a bookkeeper - did the math herself. She found that Nina was trying to (unintentionally or not) upcharge us by $2,000. The whole time my mother was crunching the numbers, Nina was scoffing and giving her dirty looks. She claimed at one point that we were taking advantage of HER, when it was the other way around. She stated "You don't want to push me," and "You don't want to make an enemy of me," which I found to be an incredible overreaction to a mistake that SHE made.
Nina was rude to the woman that made my cake (so much so my cake baker brought her daughter with her to the venue in case things escalated), she was rude to my grandpa, and rude to her staff.
Another huge oversight was that she used about half of the money we paid her for the bar to buy alcohol, so inevitably, we ran out of alcohol at 9 PM. We paid her an incredible amount of money for an open, premium bar. It was incredibly embarrassing on our end, but it should be more embarrassing for her - she should have used ALL of that money and put it towards alcohol so we wouldn't run out. Instead, my in-laws had to scramble and figure out a plan during the reception, which took away from their experience.
Lastly, she kicked my husband's family out in the rain to wait for their rides. I paid for my bridal suite to get ready in AND the room across the hallway for me and my husband. When my husband and I went to bed, Nina kicked the guys out of the Gathering in the rain and told them they couldn't go into the bridal suite - only three of the groomsmen, which left his cousins and brothers outside in the rain.
I would NOT recommend this place to other brides, we were just lucky enough to have a beautiful day regardless of all of Nina's negativity and poor management.
