Woolston Manor

It's a great course. It's challenging. It's got some absolute belters.

Our school had the year 11 prom at Woolston Manor. The organisation was excellent, Lucy was immediately communicative at all times. We booked the decorations through Pearl's florists, who also provided a great service and made the room look special. The staff and security on the night were extremely efficient. A great time was had by all.

The stunning views and affordable venue is extremely let down by the poor service provided by the venue staff. After confirming with Lauren via telephone, and creating a function sheet, we agreed there would be 2 6ft trestle tables and 1 4ft table available for the head table for the bride and groom. We also agreed on one round table for the wedding cake. In the extra comments of the function sheet agreed with Lauren, we were told we would have a microphone on the day, have assistance to connect to the speakers via Bluetooth and assistance connecting to the wifi. The day before the wedding, I updated the function sheet with Lucy via telephone, and made changes of 3 6ft trestle tables instead, scrap the 4ft trestle table and add an extra round table for our wedding guestbook, as we booked a photobooth for the day and aimed to have this next to it. It is important to note, we had booked dry hire only, so our decorators and caterers were external, I believe this was a contributing factor as to why there was such poor service. The wedding day is here and we arrive at the venue and I notice there is no extra round table for the guestbook to go on so I had to call reception to get some help. A lady called Izzy came up to assist and she apologised the table was not ready when it was meant to and provided the extra round table. She then attempted to assist me with connecting to the wifi but she said there was a new wifi that she had to go and double check (and she never came back to provide this). She assisted in connecting the phone via Bluetooth to the speakers so we could play music and also showed me how to use the microphone. When it came to using the microphone to announce the bride and groom’s entrance, the microphone was showing a sign of a dead battery. The father of the bride then went down to the reception to get the battery changed. When I went to use the microphone again (now with a full battery) to announce food will be served and for guests to take a seat, the microphone was still not working. This was extremely frustrating as for the first half of the wedding we were not able to make use of the microphone. I then had to call reception again, for them to physically come up themselves to fix the microphone, and it turns out, they had plugged the Bluetooth adapter into the wrong channel, thus the microphone was not connected in the first place. A final issue I noticed was with the actual speaker itself, it kept cutting off our music and connecting to music elsewhere being played, possibly somewhere else in the venue. From my wedding playlist we were playing Bollywood music, and then out of nowhere, Pop music would come blasting through the speakers and I was extremely confused as to why this kept happening. This happened for over 20 minutes, every time I would press play on the song from my device, it would cut out after a minute and Pop music would come through. I even tried disconnecting from the speaker and then reconnecting, but the same issue would keep happening. At that point, I was extremely disappointed, so I just stopped the music altogether. A wedding is a time meant to be enjoyed with family and friends, however the issues that arose on the day because of the staff’s poor service / lack of organisation meant that there was unnecessary stress put onto the bridal party. This was such a shame because I will look back on the day and will unfortunately remember all the errors that were in the venue’s control.