Bandit's Ridge

Thank you Donna, Brad, Andrew & Brooke for your help in making our wedding everything we imagined and more! Bandit's Ridge is absolutely beautiful and I am so, so happy we booked our special day here!

Let me preface this review by saying that the location itself is lovely. The view is incredibly beautiful and the bridal suite is wonderful. The issues that my husband and I experienced with Bandit’s Ridge were with the owners. We were sold on the venue because we were told the following:
1) Donna and her husband would be hands on with helping us 
2) they would build more rectangular tables for us to use
3) they would help us set up and they would do the cleaning up 
4) they would be building a new building that would be completed by February of 2017 (our wedding was in April 2017), and that we would have full use of this building which included a grooms suite.
 A few months leading up to our wedding, I sent Donna an e-mail asking how progress was going on the construction of the new building, in addition I asked if a we could be given the number of rectangular tables we required and she said that her husband would not build new tables because he would be busy with the new building. She then informed me that the county had implemented delays and that they were hoping it would be happening soon. I continued to send e-mails and found out that they would only be breaking ground on the new building in April. I e-mailed Donna asking if we could see photos of the progress and would get responses of “Please check the facebook page”, and “check back in with me next week”. week prior to our wedding, I again e-mailed asking for an update and indicated that we would be there the day before our wedding at noon (as our contract stipulated that could begin setting up the day before as of noon), and she told me all would be ready and that was fine. When we arrived to the venue, there was dirt everywhere. The grass had not been laid. We had to wait 2 hours to get into the new building in order to set up and ended up spending hours longer there than we had anticipated. We had established prior to this day that we had wanted to use benches for the ceremony for our guests to sit on and where we wanted them placed. Instead, they set up chairs and put them facing a different direction than we had requested and did so without speaking to us about it. In addition, when I asked Donna if we could test the sound system for our aisle music she told me she did not know how to use it and it would be a 2 hour wait until her husband came home. This was after we had been there for four hours, and we had to leave to get to our rehearsal dinner. The day of our wedding, we needed help setting up and Donna and her family were there. They offered us a ladder and that was simply it. My husband had to go test the music 1 hour before our ceremony, to which again there was very little assistance given. The night of our wedding, Donna then informed me that she had eaten some of our food, and I saw her and her employee drinking a bottle of our wine. This was simply unprofessional and she was not legally entitled to any of it. All in all, the venue itself ended up turning out okay. This is despite the fact that the new building was not built as it was described to us, the grooms suite was not ready, the lights burnt out in the barn and my mother had to go pressure Donna to fix the fuse. The backdrop for the venue is beautiful, but honestly, the stress prior, the day before, of, and after our wedding was something that you should not have to deal with.