The Deauville Inn

The good part is that we loved our wedding here and our guests did too! The professionalism of the wait and banquet staff was remarkable and commented on by several of our guests. The venue is quite beautiful for a bayside wedding in the sand and the reception area was wonderful too, although on a hot sunny day like we had, the overhead tent clear top made it a little hot for our guests. Maybe a few white panels overhead would have cooled things down a bit. Overall the food was top notch. We reserved our wedding at The Deauville Inn a year in advance, to be "grandfathered in" at June 2023 prices since they would be increasing for June 2024. One week before we needed to pay the balance off, we were given our final contract to review. Up until this time, the Catering & Special Events Director was very nice, accessible, and responded promptly to any of our concerns. We reviewed the updated contract and found that instead of being charged last year's prices of $100 pp, we were being charged a flat rate of $5000. Going by our original contract, we had 34 guests at $100 pp so a total of $3400 for that portion of the bill. Our guests' seating arrangements were changed as well without our input. We emailed our concerns and heard nothing back. We then showed up in person the day before our bill was due to speak to the event director, she came down to greet us and said she was in a meeting and would come down to talk to us when it was over. We said ok since we were in town and staying there for dinner anyway. She never came back down. This was on a Friday and our bill was due the next day. Once Saturday came and we didn't hear back, we thought our wedding might be cancelled. This was very stressful. Once Tuesday came, I called and texted her and she finally got back to us that there was no problem altering the guest seating arrangements to what we wanted, but the $5000 fee was "the best they could do" given the rising costs to them. We ended up rushing a bank check to them for the full amount since we did not want to argue so close to our wedding. Isn't the point of being "grandfathered in" that you pay the prices at the previous agreed amounts? As far as we are concerned, they overcharged us $1600 and broke our contract. We had a friend do our floral arrangements, someone with decades of event design experience. She also experienced a total lack of communication with the event director which left her unimpressed. We paid a $500 fee for security since we had a potential very serious issue with an uninvited guest showing up. On the day of our wedding the event director did not introduce us to the security team to show them a picture of who to be on the lookout for. After our wedding we contacted the event director about this, telling her we saw no security present and we would like to be refunded the $500. She got back to us and said that they had four security personnel stationed around the venue and that is "not possible that we didn't see them". We thought this was very rude and unprofessional. She immediately refunded the $500 fee and wished us well. We took this as she had no desire to interact with us again. We never thought this would turn out as it did, since working with the event director for the many months leading up to our wedding, she was the model of professionalism and support. We know all the reviews are glowing for The Deauville Inn, but we just want future brides and grooms to be aware of what our experience was.