This venue is gorgeous, but the managing staff at both Avent & its sister hotel Chateau Avalon were so bad that I wouldn't choose this venue again.
We learned a few months before ...our wedding that they had booked out our wedding suite to other guests. Our coordinator called the hotel to resolve it & spoke to Sara (hotel manager), who recognized that they had booked out our room & said that their plan was to contact the people they'd double-booked a week prior & tell them that there was a maintenance issue & they had to be moved to another room. Our coordinator confirmed this a month before the wedding. It struck me as shady- why not just tell the other guests that you accidentally booked out someone's wedding suite?- but if we were gonna get the room we booked, okay I guess.
So we were obviously upset when we showed up Friday & learned that other people were already in the room. The general manager Kristy clearly caught wind that we were not happy & was immediately up in arms when she came to talk to us. She was visibly annoyed that I was asking for an explanation of how this happened. Turns out it wasn't even just one reservation booked over ours- there were multiple- and Kristy said she personally was unwilling to move even the guests who hadn't checked in yet to other rooms.
Later talking to Sara, she said that the issue was 100% the fault of Shelby Beaumont, Avent's venue director, who she accused of booking out rooms & not communicating that to the hotel. Sara also said they were not apologizing to us bc they were being "disrespected" (they were not). (Btw this is the same Sara my coordinator had been talking to before the wedding.)
This is about the end of what I was aware of on the wedding day, so everything below I learned after the fact, but it's all been verified by multiple people.
Apparently right after the ceremony, Sara pulled my coordinator & MoH aside and told them that shortly before the ceremony, "a bride and her mom" had broken into the bridal suite and screamed at the teenage guests staying there. She said the teenager's mom wanted to press charges & that she (Sara) was about to call the cops to have me arrested. During my wedding.
Obviously, my mom & I did *not* break into the bridal suite and/or yell at any teenagers. When I learned about this the next day, my very first response was "let's pull the tapes!" But conveniently they don't have cameras in that hallway.
Another thing I learned after the wedding is that Sara was shit-talking me so openly that my friends heard her. My favorite was, "Crazy bitch, she needs to be medicated." 😂
Now I have to talk about Shelby Beaumont, the venue director. She seemed very nice at our 30-day out meeting. But as soon as Kristy told us on Friday that we could not have the wedding suite & that we needed to talk to Shelby about it, she ignored every single call she got from us for 2 days. I don't think she was even at the wedding. I don't know who finally managed to talk to her, but I learned that she claimed she emailed me a month ago that our wedding suite was not available. (I did not get an email.)
Despite what appears to be a deliberate attempt to ruin our wedding, they did not succeed and it was a beautiful day. That being said, it's sad that we spent the first few days after our wedding having to think about the astonishing lengths they were willing to go to ruin our wedding, apparently in retaliation of our (valid, imo) complaints.
Highly recommend avoiding.