Mauna Lani Bay Hotel & Bungalows

I have spent my whole life visiting this beautiful resort and it was my childhood dream to marry here. My love for this place has been punched out of me from planning my wedding here. My experience working with the hotel's wedding coordinator, Pinkie Crowe, was one of the most exasperating of my life. Dealing with her and her vendors was so impossible that my husband, myself and our families almost called off our Hawaiian dream wedding, forfeiting our deposits and airfare just to alleviate the stress of having to plan a wedding from 2000 miles away with the someone so completely inept, inefficient and insensitive. Planning any wedding is stressful but confounding it with such total incompetence that it sucks the joy out of what should be a joyous occasion is unacceptable. You should not fear and/or dread your wedding. It pains me to no end that with a wedding there is no "do-over" which is why I cannot more strongly urge you to look elsewhere. Just come to the resort for your honeymoon! All we wanted was a simple, small, elegant wedding and reception by the ocean with a handful of family and friends able to make the trip (12) and wanted to enjoy spending time with them. It shouldn't have been a big deal, but the feeling that made our skin crawl is that the Mauna Lani only cares about you if you are a BIG DEAL. Unless you have at least 50 guests ready and able to travel or are willing to get ripped off by meaningless "perks" like weak ceremony niblets (fruit skewers), unnecessary decorative lighting and superfluous photo/video packages . . . you'll likely be ignored the way we were. There's nothing worse than feeling like your wedding's their lowest priority. Regardless, we wanted to create something special and to have input on who our other vendors were, like our photographer. Another point we grappled with! It seems the hotel receives kickbacks when you use their "preferred vendors". Finding our own fantastic outside vendors was the saving grace for my sanity and best aspects of our wedding. After eight months of tireless efforts to communicate, and weeks without responses to decision making questions, we arrived to find key issues still not correct and/or settled, such as our ceremony style and rehearsal dinner menu. There was a constant retraction of what was "actually" available us - the elegant steak and seafood plated dinner originally offered was reduced to a family buffet of fried chicken and biscuits because of the number of rooms booked by my guests. Perhaps the most disturbing part was having to reiterate to Pinkie Crowe what prices and options she had initially offered me when she increased our commitment to guest rooms and impoverished our dinner buffet. I prey I will never have to wage a battle for Mahi Mahi again for the rest of my life. (***To their credit, any stars are earned solely by the quality of the food and service at the reception. The people taking care of you at the hotel are lovely and my guests enjoyed their stay. Like I said, good for honeymooning!***) In the end (among other things) Pinkie offended our friends and family at the ceremony AND reception, the minister read the WRONG ceremony (Hawaiian themed instead of Civil a.k.a."T'il death do us part"), and the hotel destroyed the top layer of my wedding cake before I even received it. I could not wait to leave. The Mauna Lani has been my family's most favorite vacationing spot since I was seven. I will likely never return after this experience.