Party Rental Ltd.

I shopped around to compare rates of a few NYC-area event rental companies, and Party Rentals Ltd. did seem to have the best prices. They had everything I needed and were pretty good with letting me revise my order a few times before finalizing as I worked towards figuring out our final head count and exact rental needs.

I am, however, a little disappointed with the service. I don't believe I was ever able to get anyone on the phone, so all communication was done over email. And since I was doing the planning without a professional wedding planning to assist me, I had a lot of questions that would have been easier solved with some more direct communication. But PRL is a rental company, not an event planning company, so perhaps this was just not their role.

In the end, I just had to make my best guess with a few rental items, and one of them -- an electric oven -- wound up being too big to fit through our venue's door. The dimensions are on the website, so buyer beware I guess, but it just would have been nice to have a sales rep help me look out for potential problems like this. The day of the wedding, PRL sent out a replacement oven at the last minute, but it ended up not being right for the job, so I was able to get them to credit me the cost of the rush delivery.

Finally, the folding chairs for our reception showed up dirty. Some even appeared to have cake from someone else's wedding smeared on them. Our set up crew had to wipe down the whole lot, which was an annoyance. When I asked about this later, my rep said we could have called and they would have sent replacements, but I'm skeptical that there would have been time for that. Who knows.

All things considered, I would still recommend Party Rental Ltd with the caveat that you must do your homework to make sure you are ordering correctly for your event, because the staff there is fairly hands off.