Columbia Collective

We toured the venue and fell in love with it, and booked our date after chatting with the venue about their rules on cancelling if anything were to come up. They told us we could cancel as long as they could rebook the date, so we booked and paid the $10k deposit. Two weeks later we found out we couldn't get married on the date we chose, so we communicated this with the venue and they immediately went back on their previous statement (which we had in writing) and acted as if we couldn't get out of the booking. After reminding them of our previous guarantee that they would attempt to rebook our date, they "tried to rebook" but we found out repeatedly from at least 5 different people over the next 6 weeks that they were not listing our date as available to book. It's hard to rebook the date if you're not telling the public about the date! We caught them in numerous, repeated lies, as our venue contact told us they were pushing the date as hard as they could but no one was interested, meanwhile I had friends who were actually expressing interest and were told there were no dates available. They were very dishonest, manipulative, and slimy and it was such a disheartening way to start our wedding planning journey. Unfortunately, they are part of Landmark Events which owns the top venues in the area so they're hard to avoid, and are more interested in running a wedding factory as opposed to creating a space for special occasions for their clients. Our wedding planner, without filling her in on our experience, told us how many bad experiences she's had with that company. If possible, I'd either avoid Landmark altogether or go into your experience knowing you need to be on your toes and be ready to keep them honest.