CASTLE MC CULLOCH & THE CRYSTL

After renting and paying 1/3 of the rental cost up front to book the venue for our wedding in January, 2012 for our June, 2012 wedding, we had a very difficult time with receiving communication from the Castle representatives.  My husband and I along with our wedding planners and caterers would leave voicemails and send emails with specific questions relating to our event.  It would take multiple calls and emails to get answers to our questions.  We then scheduled a walk through at the venue with the caterer, planners, DJ and castle rep and when it was time for the walk through the castle representative said, "Who are you? What are you here for?" and "Oh, that's today?".  She then spent about 15 minutes with our group of vendors and us during which she whispered into our planner's ear what she had to say.  The planner then had to tell us that she said our event would be a disaster if we used the space in the way we planned (the use for which they had rented the space to us in January).  After that, she said, "yes, you can do it the way you're planning, it will all be ok".  Then she said she had meetings and phone calls so she had to leave our meeting, promising to call the wedding planner later that afternoon and go over everything with her at that time.  She did not call as she had said, and after about a week of the planners trying to get in touch with her she finally responded.  They have a preferred vendor list that they enourage you to use by giving you a discount of 1% off your space rentals.  The preferred vendors are paying them a fee to be their preferred vendors and then also giving a cut of about 20% of their sales.  Therefore the vendors cost more to use in order to afford the fees that they pay.  If you don't use a preferred caterer, the renter pays 20% of their largest space rental in a fee to the castle.  So either way, you are paying the castle for catering which they do not provide.  The castle does not allow your caterer to provide alcohol service (which is included typically) and they charge you a bar fee per guest no matter the guest's age ranging up to $9 per guest. 3 days after our wedding, I went to the castle to pick up the remaining alcohol from our bar.  When I arrived the manager comes to me and says I owe fees for damages done by the caterer.  We had signed some sort of damage deposit when renting the space and they had just found damages 3 days later and had not contacted us about these damages or the fact that they would be charging a fee for those damages.  I refused to pay the damages until they informed my husband about them and provided proof in photos and a copy of the signed damage form.  After I left their premises, they charged my card without my knowledge.