I can't believe I took a whole year before writing this review for Kristi. However, the service that I got from her is SOOO AMAZING that I still can't stop talking about her to all my friends! We got married in Sept 2009 and we in fact did not hire Kristi to be our wedding photog. Unfortunately we had a VERY BAD experience with our wedding photog which left me extremely unsatisfied with our wedding photos. In order to make up for that, we decided to find another photog to do a "trash the dress" session and Kristi was the one we ended up picking! She is so nice and easy-going - we had an instant connection with her right after the 1st meeting with her. And not to mention that she is extremely flexible and in fact met us in San Diego (where we lived at the time) even though she works in the OC area. We wanted to do the TTD session before the weather got cold, but both Kristi and we had really busy schedule in the next couple months so we never firmed up a date at the beginning. In November, we were able to find a free day which Kristi was supposed to be free, and contacted her and she immediately said OKAY even though we didn't give her too much notice (something like 3 days in advance)! The day of the photo shoot.... it was SOOOO AMAZING. She is EXTREMELY talented! I'm quite shy in front of camera but she made me very comfortable and could just be myself. We wanted a combination of different backgrounds which meant traveling to different locations. Kristi was extremely accommodating and took us from Laguna downtown, to the Montage beach, and then ended in a field with cool scenery and lighting in San Juan Capistrano. I finally felt so relieved and happy that we had shoot almost everything that I had in mind. Just a week or 2 later, Kristi had finished editing our photos and they came out ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! We are so in love with all of them.... so much more than our wedding photos! We are so happy that we decided to do the TTD shoot with her and would DEFINITELY recommend her to anyone!

I decided to add a listing for Party Posies in PW because I feel strongly about writing them a review for other brides who are considering using them. I have a very unpleasant experience with them which led me to decide to change my florist 1 month before my wedding. They acted extremely unprofessionally and didn't put customer to be their first priority. The major mistake that I did was to sign the contract with them at the end of our first consultation. First of all, Rosana sounded very professional, detail-oriented, and customer-friendly during our first meeting. She gave us a lot of examples of her services for other brides especially her day-of-coordinating service which we weren't interested on. At the end of our 2 hours meeting, she drafted up an estimate after finding out our budget. She was able to meet our budget, and on top of that gave us a $200 discount and also threw in day-of-coordinating service for free IF we book with her THAT DAY before leaving her office. We decided to book her since she seemed to be very professional during our meeting, but that was probably a "tactic" that she used to get her customers. Since our meeting with her, we had a lot of problems dealing with her, as listed here:

(1) She has typos all over contract which seemed very unprofessional.
(2) She also made many mistakes in first draft of contract (and keep in mind this is AFTER I decided to book with her at our first meeting). Some items didn’t match what I’ve requested but she claimed that I wanted what she wrote down, and therefore causing price increase when I asked for changes.
(3) take every little misunderstanding on the contract as an opportunity to increase price (happen more than once)
(4) Difficult to set up meeting time to go through details of the wedding day
(5) She has promised to make us mock-up pieces of the centerpiece as well as bridal bouquet at a bridal show which we attended only for that reason. She failed to make my bridal bouquet claiming that it wouldn’t last, and my centerpiece was NOT done in my color pallet.
(6) She claimed that she always make the flowers 2 days before the wedding, which made me doubt the freshness and the quality of her flowers. I checked with other florists and they always do it the day before the wedding!
(7) I have requested to send my dad to pick up personal flowers in her office the morning of my wedding. She REFUSED to be there 30 min earlier and would have to charge us extra if we want to pick up flowers 30 min early. And when I confronted her in a different conversation saying that she isn’t doing what a vendor should’ve done to ACCOMMODATE the customers, she lied and claimed that she has offered to deliver my personal flowers to me and I was still unhappy about her service. She has NEVER offered that in any previous conversation.
(8) Major error in final contract to be > $1000 over estimate and did not apologize for making such huge mistake.

I had a posting on a PW forum when I was going through this. Please check it out:
http://www.projectwedding.com/post/list/a-mess-dealing-with-my-florist-need-advice

I ended up breaking our contract and went with a different florist for my wedding since I was so disgusted by people at party posies. They are absolutely unprofessional and never try to accommodate their customers. However, what worth their 1 star is the fact that they did realize I was very unhappy with them and offered to return 50% of our initial deposit. The other 50% could be applied toward any future event and I ended up having them make some optional floral decorations that I originally didn’t want to spend money on for my wedding. Their work was acceptable for those items. However, based on my experience with them, I would highly recommend going elsewhere to give you a peace of mind.

We had our wedding at this venue in September 2009. Although the venue is beautiful and more reasonable in terms of pricing, there are a lot of complaints that we have before and on the day of the wedding.

First of all, Michelle and Amanda were the two amazing persons who this venue cannot live without in order to sustain in the wedding business. Unfortunately, they were let go by the venue about 1.5 months before my wedding. After I found out that Michelle was gone, the specifics of planning my wedding with the venue went downhill. Gil, although is very nice, but lacks details and just simply doesn't know what to look out for since he was the club manager and never really had to spend time on the wedding planning part. Rob was the F&B manager, he was actually quite nice to us unlike to the other bride, but we were definitely unhappy with certain specifics for the day of the wedding. I will list out some examples below:

(1) Gil is slow in responding emails and rarely returns phone calls, and usually don't address all the questions I have.
(2) They failed to compile my day of details list, and I ended up typing up everything myself to send to the venue, which should've been their job.
(3) They failed to give me a correct cost estimate to calculate my last payment. I got frustrated so I did it myself and send over to them. Again I did their job for them.
(4) Gil promised that a newly hired assistant could help us on the day of the wedding during the ceremony for cue-ing and coordinating, etc. Except that she is OFF on our rehearsal day so she ended up not helping us on our wedding day.
(5) We had the reception room up to 11pm, but the staffs started cleaning up the room at 10pm! They cleaned out all the cakes, unfinished drinks, even threw away favors/menu cards which my guests have purposely gathered together to take home. When I turned my head and wanted to finish my cocktail, my drinks and the sweetheart table were ALL CLEAN. They even started stacking chairs while I still have guests on the dance floor before 10:30pm.

These are just some examples. I think if they want to survive in the wedding business, they will need to hire Michelle back to be their catering manager because she CAN do her job well.

I do want to say that I had a great time at my wedding and I think this location is one of the best in PV for people who cannot afford Trumps or Terranea. However, I have to say that I'm very disappointed at the staffs and managements there and hope that they can step up their customer service in the future.

UPDATE in January 2010:
Over the past two months, we have been talking back and forth with the venue regarding one additional unacceptable mistake/tactic that they did. After the wedding, we finalized the bill with PVGC only to find out that we fell short from the F&B minimum. We were surprise how much we were short, and then talked to our friends to find out that in fact they had not been coming back to serve wine during dinner which was a big portion that was counted toward our food and beverage minimum. In addition, we also fell short from our cap on the host bar. Unfortunately it was a F&B minimum so we just had to pay up to that amount. However, after we talk to our friends further, we found out that the host bar has turned into a CASH BAR before our cap was met! The bartender was asking the guests to pay while those drinks could've been covered under our F&B minimum! Basically the venue has received double amount for those drinks that were paid by my guests. We were extremely upset after learning this fact and once again contacted the management. We told them that we would take legal action if we are unsatisfied with their response. Finally, they agreed to pay us back the amount unused. Although we got our money back, we are very unhappy with the entire experience with the people at this venue and I would not recommend this place unless they change up their management team.

Elaine and her team is definitely one of the vendors that I'm most happy with for my wedding. I found Elaine on project wedding and decided to do a trial with her after seeing so many positive reviews with her. Elaine was very patient with me. I originally thought I wanted a more natural look which would have faint eyeshadow. After Elaine applied what I wanted, I changed my mind and she immediately applied more eyeshadow to help me decide which look I like most. We ended up testing out two more styles and I decided on a more smokey eye look which look absolutely gorgeous. I also have two completely different hairstyles tested out at the trial since I wasn't sure what I wanted. I was very happy with Elaine after the trial and decided to book with her. I had done a trial with another makeup artist which disappointed me very much. From that experience, I knew that picking Elaine was correct.

Fast forward to wedding day, I booked Elaine and 2 other girls in her team to do hair and makeup for me, my 3 bridesmaids, and 2 moms. They were on time even though the hotel room that I got ready at was very very difficult to find in a new resort (Terranea in Palos Verdes). She got to work immediately and spent a full 3 hour on my makeup and hair. She knew what I wanted from the trial, and her work is just magnificent! I never felt that beautiful in my life and I'm glad I felt that on my wedding day! I also love the fact that she is able to make me still "look like me" even with a good amount of makeup on. She is also very good with hair. My makeup and hair stay on beautifully from 11am to 11pm with no problem. One more plus with Elaine and her team is the other girls who did the hair and makeup for my bridesmaids and moms are also great. I was a little bit concerned about that at first (since I have had bad experience with good main makeup artist who has lousy assistants). But other girls in her team were so good at what they do that all my bms also have very cute hair up-dos and beautiful makeup. Overall I was extremely happy with Elaine makeup team and I would highly recommend her!