Sheraton Baltimore Washington Airport Hotel - BWI

The event coordinator at the Sheraton BWI Hotel is unbelievably knowledgeable, helpful, and flexible. The hotel itself provided a classy, warm atmosphere for the reception. They offered a good selection of dinner options, prepared the food well, and discretely accommodated guests' special needs. On the negative side, though the party was still going strong, the staff began breaking down tables 30 minutes before the event was over. For this they only get 4 stars for quality of service.

This venue is really lovely, and in the end, our reception turned out beautifully. I would hesitate to recommend that anyone use them because of their incredibly slow response rate. It took me an average of 5 email/phone/front desk contacts to get a single response from them. It's a stress that no bride should take on. Until they hire more staff, I would be wary of using this venue.

We held our reception at the Sheraton BWI and while the event itself went smoothly, all of the planning leading up to the event was a nightmare. The coordinator of our reception changed three times in a year. Response time was extremely slow. Emails were never responded to, phone calls never answered, even leaving a voicemail was a problem because mailboxes were full. The only way we could truly get anything accomplished was to meet the coordinator in person. We see this as poor management - the coordinator we worked with is responsible for events at 4 hotels in the area, which is obviously too much for one person to handle.

We also had issues with our room blocks at the hotel - we informed the coordinator that we had many out of town guests and would probably need about 20 rooms. She told us to reserve 10, since that is free of charge, and when they filled up, they would add 10 more rooms. Somehow, we ended up with only 7 rooms at the Sheraton and found out that the hotel had completely booked up without them telling us. We had guests calling saying they couldn't get a room, which added way too much extra stress. They were able to save us some rooms at the Westin next door, but we still had people staying all over the area. Both the Westin and Sheraton staff were very difficult to deal with regarding reserving rooms for guests.

Other issues we had were with money. We made three deposits in the year leading up to the wedding, and when it came time to pay my final balance, they could not find record of 2 of the 3 payments. I quickly showed them my bank statements and copies of the cleared checks, but still found this extremely unprofessional. Another issue that is still unresolved is an over $10,000 charge to my father-in-law's credit card. We used his card to hold our bridal suite for our wedding night, which was included in our reception package. Therefore, the credit card should not have been charged anything. We couldn't get a response from the Sheraton BWI and ended up calling Starwood Hotels about the matter. They couldn't get information from the Sheraton either and told us we had to go through the credit card company to resolve the issue. Totally unprofessional and illogical.

The reception itself went well - everything was set up how we had asked, service and food were good. However, because of the events leading up to and following the wedding, we strongly do not recommend this location.