Highbrighton Farm

throwing up our hands. During that time, we worked with 3 different wedding managers. We spent innumerable hours bringing each subsequent manager up to speed, clarifying discrepancies in our contract, and navigating the personal and professional conflicts within the Highbrighton team. After about 9 months with the first manager, she just stopped answering our calls and emails. When we finally got in touch with someone at Highbrighton, they asked who we were. By then, we had already paid more than $10,000. We were told that the previous manager had up and left and that someone new would be coming in soon. Someone new did come in, but they also left within a few weeks. When the pandemic interrupted our wedding which was schedule for May 2020, Highbrighton requested that we reschedule our wedding to September - which we did, of course. When we asked to reschedule to 2021 after it became clear that September would not be safe, Highbrighton told us that they would only allow us to reschedule if we signed a new contract under their new pricing scheme, which would nearly double the price of our wedding. They offered the option of cancelling and losing our security deposit of $4,000. We were told that Robert, the property owner who we never met, was losing money on our wedding. Of course, if that is true (which I doubt) it was his team who negotiated a bad contract. After I responded to say that our contract allowed us to reschedule without a price adjustment, I received an email from their lawyer voiding our agreement. There were occasions when it was difficult to determine if their errors were a result of incompetence or duplicity. On one occasion, for example, the Highbrighton manager sent us a budget in Excel summarizing our costs. I wish I could attach that document to this post because it was a masterclass in how not to build a budget in Excel. The incompetence aside, the budget double-counted numerous cells, increasing our overall cost by $2,000. The double-counting was hidden away in a line item (not a sub-total or grand total). If you weren't comfortable working Excel or if you didn't go through the very convoluted budget with a fine tooth comb you would have missed it. It's hard to know if that was the intention. In addition to all of these major challenges, there were many small ones. The wedding manager, for example, just didn't show up to our vendor meetings, leaving us without essential information about the Highbrighton property that the vendors needed. There are a lot more frustrations than what I mentioned here, but hopefully this gives a picture of our experience.