I was willing to give a 3.5-4 star rating before the wedding day. Blackwoods had decent pricing comparatively and they were friendly and professional. Responses were a bit delayed, but our contact always came through. Unfortunately she was only able to meet M-F between 8-4:30 -terribly inconvenient for someone who works a normal day-time job. Later on in the process she did agree to meet me downtown near my place of work during my lunch hour.
After the day of the wedding we were ready to give them a less than 1 star rating. The "manager" on duty was not the lady we had been working with through the whole process, but some young, inexperienced girl.
When we went to finish room setup, we discovered the tables were not setup according to the plan the venue had drawn up for us. Everything had to be shuffled around (not the sort of stress you want the night before). During our dinner buffet, they ran out of food before all our guests got through the line -despite having fewer guests show up than our final head count.
Shortly after dinner the power went out. The venue had no back-up plan or generator. When the lights went out all the Blackwoods staff fell apart. They all disappeared. They didn't clean off the dinner tables nor did they clean off tables from the dance floor.
Our DJ saved the night by finding a backup generator for us (they tried to "thank her" with $30 in gift cards -how tacky). The Blackwood staff failed to save our cake's top tier (our DJ also saved this from getting eaten by guests). The staff served our cake not our brownies. I personally had to hunt someone down to get the brownies out...then they only served 1 of the 2 kinds. Also, thank goodness we had purchased kegs, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to serve alcohol without the power.
They offered us the room rental rate back (a small portion of what we paid for the services) as a refund in apology for the debacle. But then made us jump through hoops to get that.
