Complaint Review: The Stratosphere Casino & Wedding Chapel - Las Vegas Nevada

September 3rd, 2007

Please note that although all of the contents of this letter are not necessarily applicable or relevant to each department, it does all intertwine since a wedding is an overall experience when all aspects have taken place in one building.

To Whom it May Concern,

As you are aware working in the field you do and perhaps from personal experience, a couples wedding day is one of the most important transitional points of their lives as well as a very sentimental and emotional time. Although our wedding at the Stratosphere on July 7th, 2007 was beautiful and elegant, there are a few things that truly did not go well for us. We cannot let it go without expressing our feelings about our experience with your staff. The intent of this letter is not solely to complain because as I stated before there are many aspects of our wedding that were wonderful. Mostly, our intentions lie in the area of helping you hear a customers point of view to help aid in future clients satisfaction as well as having our disappointments validated - if not compensated somehow.

When we first ordered our wedding package our friend did it online with her credit card (In November of 2006) when she realized that only two openings were left for the 7th (10 am or 11:30 pm). After the transaction was made we made numerous attempts to contact the Stratosphere wedding chapel (a few times via email and even more times via phone) to switch the credit card under our name as well as to update our contact information. Unfortunately, our attempts were not answered for at least a month and for as long as 3 months. We do wonder, however, if our wedding coordinator Marijha Hamawi did not receive our messages at first because once we did communicate with her she was very efficient, accurate and quick to return our emails or phone calls. It was very unnerving until we had that communication, however, since the itinerary was emailed to our friends email address at first and she never saw it. When no return phone calls or emails were made we began to wonder if we even had a wedding day booked there. We felt as though our wedding was unimportant to the staff there which surprised us because the package we chose was on the higher end of what you had to offer.

Cashman Professional Photography contacted us to set up an appointment to go over the pictures. Our wedding was at 11:30 pm and they wanted to meet with us at 10:00 am the next morning. We stated that we found that to be too early and then heard the statement that we were to hear during our whole wedding experience at the Stratosphere, Well, you know, that day is a very busy day. We were very aware how busy that day was going to be and were left with no doubt of that by the time it was over after hearing that comment repeatedly. We understood it was going to be busy, but hearing it over and over made our wedding day seem petty and insignificant as if we werent as important as all of the other brides and grooms somehow.

We ordered a block of rooms for our guests and assumed that one of the rooms was for us as that was the impression we were under. When we called to confirm our room reservation a few weeks before the wedding, we realized that there had been a misunderstanding and the staff were quite rude about it. We realize that there was little they could do at that point, but we were not rude with them and expected the same courtesy. However, after Robin (who was in charge of our block of rooms) was able to get in touch with us, she found a way to get us a room and was very pleasant to do business with.

On the actual wedding day we were sure to arrive 10-15 minutes early as was suggested to us. That was a big mistake. The room was not ready for Aimee (even when the correct time arrived) and Paul E. almost saw her in her dress (after she flew with it from Minneapolis and kept it from him for 6 months) but luckily her mother intervened. Then the guests all started crowding around Aimee and not being seen before the ceremony was one of the most important things to her. Also, while she was in the dressing room, one of the staff members told a male guest that he could use the restroom in there (which was full of urine before he used it).

The ceremony was wonderful, the chapel was elegant and the personal attendant was excellent!

After the ceremony, the photographer rushed us over for pictures of any family members that we wanted and then brought us over for the cake picture. When he told us to cut the cake Aimee asked with what? as she didnt see the cutlery and the photographer sarcastically replied with the knife. He took a photo of us cutting the cake, but we didnt get to feed it to each other (we were nervous, and never being married before, we simply forgot to ask for that photo to be taken).

In fact, we never got to taste the cake at all. We were rushed away from our guests and brought upstairs to the observation deck for pictures. We were his 13th photo shoot for the night and that was very apparent. Once inside and after some more photos, Aimee remembered how windy it was on the observation deck and felt her hair. It was sticking straight up-you figure the photographer would have mentioned it. It was hard to pick out 12 decent pictures from the stack we looked through. He really didnt have much to work with, however, we were already nervous from the wedding and being rushed like that made us even more nervous and uncomfortable. The day we looked at the pictures we called and left a message because we noticed that the information pertaining on how to look at the pictures online were being sent to the wrong email address. We have friends and family members, as well as ourselves, who wanted to purchase photos but our message was never returned and thus, no one could buy any.

The most upsetting part of our wedding was after the photography was done. We took the elevator back down to join our guests at the reception so we could continue the festivities. It was only approximately 20 minutes after midnight and when we arrived to the floor none of the staff knew anything about our reception-every one was gone! As I found out later, people were rushed out way before the 30 minutes that we payed for. The reception costed more than the wedding and we would have never, ever had one if we knew that our full time would not be granted-it wasnt even close to a half hour. I am O.K. with the fact that the ceremony was shorter, it was beautiful, but our guests being rushed out 10 to 15 minutes early is beyond unacceptable, especially after the costs being so high for each additional guest for a piece of cake and a glass of champagne. We deserve compensation due to the fact that we did not get what we paid for.

When we took the elevator down we had to ride it with the service people which would have been fine except for 3 factors:

1/ It took at least 10 minutes but closer to 20 minutes in the actual elevator and Aimee is extremely claustrophobic.

2/ The employees went on and on about their 12 hour days. We have worked long days as well in customer service. Your clients should never be aware of the fact that you had a long day.

3/ We had to stop and wait at each floor for minutes at a time.

We have a hard time understanding why they couldnt have brought us down first on our wedding day, especially after paying more than $2000!

One nice thing however, when Aimee was about to start crying in the elevator, her personal attendant happened to be on it and she talked to her and was able to calm her down.

We were in another wedding on the 4th of July, 2007 at a very expensive and well known casino in Las Vegas. Their wedding only costed $700, was worry-free and they were made to feel as if their happiness and satisfaction was of importance to the casino. When asked whether or not we would recommend the Stratosphere for a wedding we are torn. What makes us glad that we got married where we did was the beautiful view, chapel and ceremony. We were never contacted after the wedding to see if we were satisfied or not.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that our concerns will be validated.

Sincerely,

Aimee & Paul E.

Aimee

St. Louis Park, Minnesota

U.S.A.