Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge

Couples, if you want a wedding venue whose coordinators are great at communicating, then this isn’t the one for you. The venue is beautiful and the wait staff are wonderful, but the coordinators there are a nightmare to work with. Before I begin, I want to point out that I’ve never written a terrible review about a business. My husband and I have both worked in customer service and we know how hard it can be. We understand some people have really bad days; however, their service was unacceptable in the year leading up to our wedding, so much so that it would be wrong of us not to warn future couples about what they could possibly be getting into. The biggest challenge we had to overcome was the fact they changed coordinators on us four times, and each time they did, we were either never informed or informed very late. When I emailed the first one after our initial meeting, I got a response back that said the email address was out of service. I contacted the booking agents, and they told me there was a new coordinator. This second coordinator was terrible at responding to me in a timely manner. At some points, I’d wait weeks at a time for a response. Finally, I was told that they had hired a new coordinator—#3—to take over. We, again, felt like we had to start from scratch and retell this new coordinator everything that we had already discussed with the previous coordinators. After a few weeks, coordinator #3 stopped responding to us via email. So, since he had given us his personal cell number, my husband called him and he told us he had stopped working at the lodge. Again, nobody at the lodge informed us of this change. Coordinator #2 and coordinator #4 ended up being the final people we worked with for our rehearsal dinner and wedding. With the amount of experience they said they had at the lodge, we did not expect to encounter the problems that we did. Coordinator #4 told us we could have the Foraker Room for our rehearsal dinner because there wasn’t anything booked there on the night before our wedding. Then, when we went there to visit and finalize things, coordinator #2 said the Foraker Room was booked for a wedding the day of our rehearsal dinner, so we had to move our rehearsal dinner to a different location. Clearly, both coordinators weren’t on the same page. Coordinator #4 created the final banquet check for our wedding. She charged nearly an extra thousand dollars for gratuity even though their menu explicitly stated that gratuity was already including within the listed prices. I pointed it out and she just called it a typo. Sure—a $1000 typo she didn’t bother to double check before sending it to me. Finally, when we told them our final guest count months prior, they assured us that they could accommodate that easily in the reception area in the arrangement we had discussed: 7 people at each of the 12 tables. Then, on the day of the rehearsal dinner, the day before the wedding, they told my husband that it’s not possible to arrange the room as we discussed. The seating chart was already printed and I didn’t want it to go to waste. My husband and our bridal party figured it out on their own the morning of the wedding. Turns out it was absolutely possible. The coordinators just gave us extra unnecessary stress for nothing. They didn’t even try to arrange the seats and tables themselves before telling us it was impossible. I hope if you do book with the lodge, you aren’t subject to their incompetency.