The Waimea Valley Audubon Center is an incredibly beautiful place and I would recommend it to anyone as an ideal wedding site. That being said, you must really want this site in order to go through what you will have to go through in order to get it. The Center uses a wedding coordinating company called E Pili Mai Weddings (which is essentially one woman) to coordinate all weddings during regular operating hours. (You can have your wedding either early in the morning or late in the afternoon through other companies but it must be very small and short.)
While the actual experience of being in that beautiful environment on your wedding day, to me, far outweighs all else, you should be warned that E Pili Mai are highly incompetent and unprofessional. She offers some wedding packages and also allow you to create your own package. The creating of our own package is what caused many of the problems for us. If it wasn't already written down in her list from her own packages, she did not know what to do. She also did not listen (or read -- since most of our communication was through email) well, nor was it in any way easy for us to contact or keep in contact with her. She did not ask what services we wanted or required (beyond assumption) nor when she was told of what we required did she acknowledge it or do anything about it. Basically, even though our deposit had been in for two months, two weeks before the wedding nothing/no one had been scheduled or booked until we talked to her face to face. It was then that she revealed to us that she had not understood our instructions (or rather, flat out denied us giving her any). Any help I had asked her for in locating other vendors (e.g. make-up artist, bridal shop for steaming/alterations, tuxedo rentals, etc.) was also never responded to. She was an almost complete disaster -- if it hadn't been for the success of three of the five vendors she supplied us with our day would definitely have been ruined. (The five vendors were the officiant, the ceremony musician, the limousine, the florist and the videographer -- the officiant, the musician and the limousine service were excellent.) In other words, most of the time she didn't know what she was doing or how to do it -- she also didn't tell us until after we got to Hawaii that we couldn't pay by check for the remainder of the balance when we had paid our deposit with a check...and to top it off, she showed up to our formal wedding wearing a denim skirt and sandals.
So, you can have your wedding at Waimea with another coordinator and at specific preset times, or through E Pili Mai. If you have the time (which I didn't), I'm sure you can avoid her incompetence by booking vendors yourself, but you will still have to use her as a go-between for the Audubon Center.
