Shiraz Garden

the new manager was difficult to work with and gave our planner so much grief. I truly think the attitudes turned sour when we decided not to book their in-house planner. You lose access to the property if you book outside of their preferred vendors and can ONLY visit the site once on your tour, but the contract states that you/your vendors can come to the open houses as an additional visit… YET in a year and a half they didn’t hold a single open house… false advertising, but hey you can pay hundreds HOURLY if you want to come out again. The entire thing felt like a gross money grab. For a wedding venue, I question how many weddings they host. All of the emails and documents they send you are outdated by years, listing old employees. They’re too lazy  to update their email templates but are trusted to host a wedding? We should have known better because they failed to deliver on our wedding day. Shiraz did not honor our schedule at all, they DIDNT TURN ON the fountain which we specifically documented and turned into Shiraz for our pre ceremony photos. Shiraz waited to do so until we were already in the woods, in the heat and mosquitos, running behind our schedule. For context, it takes 15 min for the water to reach the bottom. Why ask for all the planning sheets to just IGNORE them? Shiraz never brought our family down and then disappeared in the golf carts for another 15 minutes to retrieve our wedding party (leaving my husband, I, and our photographer alone with no venue staff or way to call them). Our party was waiting for the staff to come get them and the staff was riding around helping the caterer (??) and giving guests rides from the very close by parking lot… while leaving us in the woods for at least 30 minutes. This put our entire wedding behind schedule. When I asked why they didn’t bring our family down, she said “well couples usually do those photos after the ceremony” - no apology, no accountability, just blaming us… In addition to putting us behind schedule, they let our photographer & my husband get soaked in the rain because they only brought one golf cart and had to shuttle us in multiple trips. When it came time for the ceremony, we asked directly on multiple occasions to drive me behind the building so our guests wouldn’t see my dress before the ceremony - they disregarded that and drove me in front of guests twice, my planner had to grab a table linen to hold up between myself and our seated guests so they wouldn’t see me. Later, the venue staff asked my wedding party to start cleaning early, like 2 hours before the end of the event because miscommunication from the venue about cleaning the bridal cottage vs pulling reception decor. Also, just beware you won’t be able to use the indoor area. When we booked a year out, they said they’d have the indoor area cleaned out and ready by our wedding, surprise - they didn’t. That part was fine for us because our rain backup was still their outdoor space, but just something to keep in mind with the price tag, that you don’t even get access to that huge indoor space. Overall, Shiraz was terrible to work with, unorganized, unprepared, and disrespectful, and I would NEVER recommend this venue. For $7,500 (which I think they bumped up to 11k), we expected more and were disappointed.