River's Edge Hotel & Spa

Overall, the Avalon Hotel and Spa was an amazing venue for our wedding! Leslie, the Catering Manager, and Courtney, the Catering Coordinator, were very helpful from the moment we first toured the Avalon through our wedding weekend. The food catered by the onsite restaurant, The Aquariva, was absolutely amazing (I would HIGHLY recommend the goat cheese raviolis!), and we got to do a full tasting before deciding on our entree options and appetizers. The staff at the Avalon was very helpful leading up to the wedding as well. Leslie and Courtney answered emails and phone calls promptly and were always helpful, and they let us bring many of our decorations, programs, wine, and other miscellany to the Avalon to store it there in the weeks before the wedding, so that we would not have to worry about doing those things the week before and the day of. The night of the wedding went beautifully. The staff set up all the chairs and arranged the flowers how we wanted them, and then they flipped the whole room for dinner service while the guests enjoyed an outside cocktail hour with beautiful views of the river. All of these things were amazing about the Avalon. The one snafu we really experienced centered around the guests booking rooms at the wedding rate. I had several guests who (thankfully!) let me know they had trouble booking rooms, either with people who informed them there were no rooms left at the rate (there were) or with people who were extremely unknowledgeable and unhelpful about the booking process and the availability at the Avalon. It took many phone calls from me to Leslie to get to the bottom of the problem: the Avalon uses an external answering service to take calls when their front desk is too busy, and the answering service did not have the appropriate wedding rate/room availability information for my guests when they would call and try to book. It was very frustrating when I had to be the middleman for booking rooms, and I finally had to take our guest list to Leslie and go through it one by one to make sure everyone who booked a room was at the correct rate. To Leslie's credit, she went through the list thoroughly, found some guests who had not been booked properly, and called them to offer the wedding rate. It ended up fine, but was a major hassle while it was happening. I would highly recommend having your event at the Avalon. The food was delicious, the staff was amazing, especially Leslie, and the venue, views and rooms were gorgeous. I would just caution that you keep an eye on who is booking rooms and whether they got the right rate. If you keep up with that, the rest will take care of itself!

My out of town family stayed at the Avalon and were happy with their experience, however there were a couple of things that were unappealing. such as the fact that a drunk driver crashed into the two front enterance doors and they did not block them off or get them repaired the whole week my family was staying there, they just left them broken and half open. There were also no mini fridges in the rooms unless you got a suite. My mom had to purchase a cooler and use ice. I personally have stayed at a lost more inexpensive hotels and had a mini-fridge in my room. The rooms were well decorated, stylish, and very clean. They were roomy and did have a balcony which was nice. The location is beautiful and the staff is eager to please.