Ranch Austin is a beautiful venue! The staff is all so nice and very helpful. I was so excited to have my wedding here, and while there were lost of last minute changes due to wea...ther, the night went off without a hitch and it was absolutely perfect.
I took some stars away for three really specific reasons. If I had known about these issues going into renting with them, they could have easily had 5 stars.
1. Everything is extra. You are literally paying for JUST the venue and what is on the list above. When I visited, there were a few decorations out that were about hundreds of dollars each to rent if I actually wanted them out on my wedding day. This even included space heaters, which was a little weird to me...my guests have to freeze if I can't afford to include the space heater rentals?
2. It rained ALL day on my wedding day. I was not a huge fan of the rain plan being 100% up to me. It was a little stressful having to make decisions on where to move the ceremony, how the tables would be laid out, etc on the day of my wedding. It would have been nice if the venue had an already established rain plan that they could have presented to me vs having me make the decisions.
3. Lastly, It would have been nice to have a couple of other covered options for pictures. They only have the main ballroom and then a little covered stage on the patio. With 200 guests, the ballroom clearly had to be the holding place for the guests, leaving us the stage outside for our only location for pictures. Not that anyone else will really notice, but all of our pictures-first look, wedding party, family, etc all have the same backdrop since there were no other places to take pictures.
All in all, this is a wonderful venue and Chris and Katie are amazing to work with. They made sure that everything flowed despite the horrible weather all day. While it was very tight with 200 guests, they made it work and it was actually a lot more intimate that way, which we loved.