Well, where do I start with this shocking business, awful staff & their disgusting behaviour.
My fiancé & I booked our wedding date here for the 4th June 2021. We booked this date in 2017 (so pre-covid19). When the pandemic began we, like a lot of people underestimated the gravity of the situation and just how bad things would get & how long social restrictions would be in place. So in October 2020 we decided to arrange a meeting with the events manager Chloe Walker. At this meeting we expressed our concerns surrounding the pandemic and the ways it would likely affect our wedding day. We asked if we could postpone the date for 12 months (availability depending) so we could assure the wedding we had planned would be allowed to go ahead (with no restrictions on numbers, no social distancing requirements & preferably no compulsory face masks). This request was met with a complete lack of compassion or care for their customers and a blunt NO, followed by the excuse that "they are thinking about the business" (profits, not customer satisfaction). Now, I do understand this mentality, to a degree. They run a business, not a charity however, considering we had already paid them £3,000 and were asking to simply move our date (not cancel) they were set to loose nothing!
I asked chloe what Wentbridge's suggestion was, what COULD they do for us. Chloe had to "ask the senior management" in the back office (which is brave of them). When she returned we were told that to move our date forward 12 months we would loose our initial deposit of £1,000 and would therefore be considered to have only paid £2,000 towards our final invoice. UNACCEPTABLE. the other "offer" they gave us was to essentially do nothing untill 8 weeks before the date and if the government said that our wedding could not go ahead then we would have the option to rearrange. We explained that we couldn't do this as it would likely incur huge financial loss to ourselves with other suppliers (as well as leave these other businesses in the dark). There would have also been the issue of my partners wedding dress which needed to be ordered, measured & fitted months before the wedding day. Their response to all this was essentially that it's not their problem. At this point, seeing that it looked like we would get nowhere with this business, in desperation, with my fiancé literally in tears now, I asked chloe what she would do if this was her wedding. She SHRUGGED her shoulders! This is how little this "family run" business cares about it's customers!
I have gone as far as to write a pleading letter on this matter to the company director & owner Mr Geoffrey Page, in the hopes that he may not have even been aware that his business is being managed and operated like this & that he may be the only person at that place who actually does care. I recieved no reply.
We eventually had to make the very difficult decision to cut our losses so as to not incur further loss through suppliers, dresses, suits etc. On the 17th November we issued a formal cancellation to chloe to which we expected to receive a reference number as per their own T&C's. We finally received this confirmation from Nicola Guest, the operations manager on the 24th November because Chloe didn't forward it! We ended up loosing the £3,000 that we had paid to them, as they refused to refund it!
This whole situation has been handled by Wentbridge House Hotel in a completely irresponsible & unprofessional manner. There has been no compassion, understanding or even basic morality shown to us throughout. This is so disappointing because the building & grounds are stunning! They're just completely ruined by the owners, management & staff.