Chicago City Centre Hotel & Sports Club

we flew here to check out reception sites and this hotel is the best. They let us sample and try out everything. in the end we didn't to have the wedding in boston though.

Julie Howard is the most wonderful wedding coordinator you will ever find at a hotel. She has lots of energy, great ideas and her professionalism is top notch. Julie always returned our phone calls and emails within the day. She put together a wonderful list of ideas, had great suggestions for vendors. She helped to plan a wonderfully executed reception and all the timing worked out perfectly. The entire hotel staff was just absolutely wonderful and accommodating with all our requests. The menu choices were scrumptious. The vegetarian lasagna is to die for and the Chicken Harvarti Chicken which was baked in Puff Pastry just melted in your mouth. The great thing about this space is that it is entirely yours for the evening. It was private, located on the lower level which kept people from wondering in and there was no overlap with other groups, etc. We liked that so many things were included with the room & hotel, it just made our lives so much easier. I would certainly recommend this place to everyone.

Excellent experience, great location

Great place to have a reception!

The wedding planner was fantastic! Our previous location filed for bankruptcy and she hustled to accommodate us. Overall, she went above and beyond the call of duty to make our day perfect. I recommend this location to anyone looking for a great downtown wedding at a great location with amazing service at a great price.

Chicago City Centre Hotel was a Holiday Inn hotel when we had our reception there in August 2005. It is now (2007) an independent hotel, not affiliated with Holiday Inn. My husband and I paid for our wedding ourselves and this was definitely one of the more affordable downtown hotels to have our reception. Extras like included bridal suite, parents' rooms, and linens, chairties, candelabras, etc. were part of the package at the time of our wedding.

There were unfortunately no views to the downstairs ballroom, but we had the ballroom and cocktail area all to ourselves (only 1 wedding takes place at time at this hotel) and the space was more than large enough for the 165+ people we had at our reception. Julie Atkinson was the wedding coordinator at the hotel and she and her staff were accommodating to our requests, such as having Maker's mark at the reception for my husband and his friends and she threw in some extras like coordinating red napkins. She was also open to working in some Asian themes for the menu, which we ultimately opted not to do, as a third of our guests were Chinese and we decided that the food was not going to be authentic enough to accommodate that crowd. We served Chicken Wellington as an entree and I thought the food at our reception was good, though probably not memorable for our guests.

I do have to say that I did have to work to stay on top of things - conversations and e-mails regarding previously discussed details had to be rehashed a few times and there was a mix-up with the parking situation for our guests that thankfully my day of coordinator sorted out.

All in all, though our guests had a great time at our reception - the ballroom was a large space with tall ceilings that was beautifully decorated, the dance floor was plenty big and the parking issue resolved. I'd recommend the Chicago City Centre Hotel as definitely an option to check out for an affordable downtown Chicago wedding, especially for larger weddings, as I believe they can accommodate up to 800 people.

Additionally, we also used Chicago City Centre Hotel as our hotel block for our out of town guests. We had a great experience using the hotel for our hotel block.