Columbia Gorge Hotel

Alp and Elisa were absolutely wonderful to work with! They took over after the previous wedding planner left. They were very communicative and accomodating since we were planning from afar. We were able to enjoy a chef's dinner prior to our wedding to select our appetizers for the cocktail party and main entrees for the reception dinner. The food was great! The venue is gorgeous and is a photographer's dream. Both Alp and Elisa made our special day stress free and amazingly everything went without a hitch. The value of CGH is very competitive compared to other venues and we are so glad we shared our special day here. Highly recommend!!

Stunning site but hard to work with! Pros: The hotel and surround landscaping are stunning. Perched along the gorge, there are many superb on-site locations for photo opportunities. Food is delicious (kudos to Chef Mike). Front desk staff and restaurant staff are courteous and helpful. Cons: The Event Coordinator (Elisa) and GM (Alp) are difficult to work, even for our simple event that included only 13 guests. The team was slow to respond, flaky, unorganized, and inexperienced. For example, we were unable to get a finalized event order until the day before the wedding, despite reaching out to Elisa multiple times. Responses from the management were often full of excuses, unprofessional, and misleading. Note that most of the positive reviews for this location were posted for the previous management team, none of which is there any longer. I strongly advise couples to get all services promised in writing, and perhaps consider hiring a professional event planner to interface with the hotel.

In response to the previous review dated 8/08/2019, I can tell you exactly why their previous event coordinator "unexpectedly left" the organization. It was because she was let go based on the decision of the Genaral Manager. He decided the hotel was no longer going to contract with outside entities to do their event planning, and that's what Teresa was. Only she had served them in that capacity for many years, and she was the main reason my wife and I decided to get married at the Gorge Hotel. Problem was, this "letting go" of Teresa occurred a week and a half before our wedding date, after we had been working with her for nearly two years on the planning of our event. Forget the fact that the firing also occurred during peak wedding season, so I'm sure there were other couples who were caught off guard by this move as well (whom I urge to come forward to share how their experience went this Summer, good or bad), but my wife and I were assured by the new GM himself, that he could step in and perform Teresa's duties with minimal to no snags. This, ladies and gentleman, was simply not the case. Our wedding was a sh_t show. Don't get me wrong, the ceremony itself was lovely, and virtually all 180 guests have come to us and said they had a wonderful time (as if they would say anything else), but my wife WAS the coordinator that whole weekend, and it was an absolute nightmare for her. The GM was MIA much of the time, and the person he had brought on to assist him that weekend, bless her heart, was relatively clueless to our needs, and both her and him were both completely unable to adapt on the fly to the situation that started unraveling after the festivities began an hour and a half late. And what was the reason for the wedding not getting going for that period of time? Well, we believe we can trace that line all the way back to the hairdresser, make up artist, floral people, guests, musicians, DJ, bridesmaids, groomsmen all having no idea where they were supposed to go and when they needed to be there. And who ended up having to solve these issues than no other than the bride herself on the day of her own wedding (with as much support as I could provide, also not knowing the answers to many of the issues being thrown our way, and having to ultimately defer to her). This, dear reader, was what we thought we had paid tens of thousands of dollars to this venue for; some sort of suitable, experienced staff member to run the freaking show for us! We consider one of the main services offered for the enormous price tag for getting married at this place to have been, essentially, an in-house wedding coordinator named Teresa, who by all accounts of all the rave reviews previous to her firing, was an absolute go-getter. In short, we were robbed of this service, with no rebate. And as an added bonus, there are multiple accounts from multiple guests who described the GM as being rude and unaccommodating, especially during the stretch of time where we had extra hungry guests with extra hungry kids due to the later than usual hour of our reception. Several of them reported to us about being barked at by him like some prison guard when they approached the buffet to grab a snack for a fussy toddler, or the like. Truly amazing stuff. I urge you, if you are considering getting marrying here, get in writing that they will provide a coordinator, or bring one yourself. Or just go elsewhere. Thanks.

Disclaimer: I did not end up booking this venue due to their poor communication skills. We originally visited this location in June. In July we decided this would be our spot and contacted the venue to start booking/planning our summer 2020 wedding. After 4 weeks of having my phone calls and emails ignored (and after being told the event manager we met left them unexpectedly and the new person did not return any correspondence), I gave up. I’ll spend my money at a venue that will actually return my phone calls and create the atmosphere a couple deserves; not create a stressful mess before the “fun” even starts. Good luck to the couples that already booked!

We couldn’t have asked for a more magical venue! They were very friendly and Teresa was open to all my ideas to make the wedding of my dreams come through. It’s a perfect location to have your ceremony and reception. Very well taken care off and simply GORGEOUS!’

I sadly have to give this venue a low rating. Yes, the Columbia Gorge Hotel is beautiful and it was a dream venue but we paid a lot of money to the venue that performed poorly. I paid for an all inclusive package since both my husband and I were doing long distance and both over 3,000 miles away from home. We paid more money because we wanted to have less stress planning our wedding and be able to know that we had everything within the package included.But, that was not the case. The event coordinator and her management was not good. I have to say that I am lucky to have a background in event planning otherwise our day would have been so much more stressful. Our package came with an onsite coordinator and throughout the process we never knew who it was actually going to be, we could never get ahold of anyone, and they never kept us informed of what was actually going on. (Throughout a year of planning with the hotel they had an event coordinator leave, and two others let go or leave, so we were never consistently working with the same person.) In our package it said we get __ amount of hours on the venue and yet they kept trying to have us leave an hour to two hours before our time was up. Previously, we told one of the coordinators we were working with that we wanted the venue until 11pm (it was in our contract that we could have it until then with the package we chose). I even have email proof of it, but once that event coordinator was let go from the hotel nothing transferred over to the new lady. Therefor the night of our wedding the staff went up to my dad, not me and yet i was paying for the wedding, and tried to tell him we had to leave in 20minutes. The staff even went to the DJ that we had chosen and said the same thing. However, our DJ stood her ground and said no she was suppose to be here until 11pm. Needless to say they charged my dad a ridiculous amount, without talking to my husband or I ( or the event coordinator who was nowhere to be found), and yet our package was suppose to include that. The hotel already took enough money from us so this was just ridiculous. Our day of coordinator hardly showed her face, she started our wedding 30 minutes late. The groomsmen were all waiting outside while we were told to wait in the spa.Then we never saw her again. Again, our package included a day of coordinator but i would hardly say we had one at all. My bridesmaids were downstairs the day of the wedding helping the staff set up in the correct format that we had sent in numerous times. When speaking to management about this afterwards he was just harsh with us. Throughout the process the communication was poor, we were lied to, and it was greatly dissapointed. When you pay for something you expect to get what you paid for and we did not. We were extremely disappointed. It was a dream venue but the management and coordinators they had did not have good communication with each other or us and it was not what we paid for. I do hope the venue turns itself around because it is a beautiful place.I know they have brought on a new event coordinator who I think and hope will do a great job for weddings and other events in the future.

We had our dream wedding at the Columbia Gorge Hotel this past June! My husband and I are from Chicago and started looking for venues one year ago after our engagement. We knew we wanted to get married in Oregon as we love hiking and the scenery. After looking at many wedding venues we fell in love with the Columbia Gorge Hotel. Our wedding guests were given such a unique experience. Our wedding ceremony was outside overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. Our cocktail hour was by the STUNNING hotel waterfall with the incredible view of the gorge and we hosted our reception inside the beautiful and intimate Benson Ballroom. Our wedding guests LOVED it. It's been a month and everyone continues to talk about the memorable experience. Everything from the service to the food was fantastic. A big thank you to Trina in the wedding/sales department at the Columbia Gorge Hotel. She worked with us from day 1 and gave us the first tour when we were looking at places one year ago and was even on site the day of the wedding and was with me before I walked down the aisle. She truly went above and beyond on every aspect and was such a joy to work with. I had ten thousand questions from our budget, vendors, food and beverage, table setting, room reservations, etc and she answered them all and guided me throughout the journey. The entire wedding and all the details she thought of were beautiful. Thank you again for giving us our dream wedding. It was more than we ever expected! We plan to come back on our one year anniversary!

When we got engaged we knew we wanted to have our wedding at the Columbia Gorge Hotel. We had come across this gem on a long weekend get away in October 2014. We instantly fell in love when we drove onto the property. Trina Serdar was our wedding coordinator at the hotel. She made it stress free in planning our wedding and went above and beyond in customer service. The food was excellent, all of the employees that worked our wedding were fabulous and the cake that the on site pastry chef made was awesome. The catering manager Carlos did a wonderful job on decorating the ballroom and made it look really elegant and the perfect place to have a reception celebration with our family and friends. The vendors for photography and floral that they referred us to were fantastic. Gorge-Us Photography did our photos and we have brilliant images that will last a lifetime. Tammy's Floral made gorgeous centerpieces and a bridal bouquet. They do it all and do an excellent job. The property makes a perfect place to have romantic beautiful wedding pictures. We had a perfect beautiful wedding and all of our guests are still talking about how beautiful and wonderful the hotel and their staff were.

Absolutely beautiful, great day-of service, a bit slacking in service leading up to the event, very basic/old-fashioned rooms, you get the whole venue for the entire day, great all-inclusive package with solid vendors, on-site spa for getting ready, perfect if you like quaint old-fashioned charm, perfect for a bride who is really on top of things herself

Ending result was beautiful, more than what I expected.

When we were looking to find a venue for our summer wedding , we knew we wanted a place not too far from our home in Kirkland, WA, but far enough away to have a wonderful weekend getaway with all of our closest friends and family. We had checked out several places but when we met with Trina Serdar at The Columbia Gorge hotel we knew this was the perfect place for us. The grounds were beautiful. The location was perfect for a small (50 person) wedding. Hood River offered numerous activities for our guests to enjoy. And Trina's friendly, professionalism gave us confidence that we would be in good hands. As we continued the journey through our planning process, Trina was so helpful. Her attention to detail helped insure everything was perfect for our wedding day. She was always a pleasure to deal with, even during the busy wedding season. I highly recommend her to any bride and groom embarking on planning their wedding. Thank you again Trina!

This place is truly so gorgeous! The only reason I don't give it 5 stars is because we had a couple problems with people booking their rooms, which did get fixed, but that was a little bit of a hassle. There were a couple miscommunication issues with the hotel coordinator, but I'm not one to freak out so I didn't. The food was amazing!!!! We had cheese cake and it was to die for. All and all it was an amazing wedding and I would recommend this place for sure!

Amazing venue! The staff was friendly and helpful. The food was amazing. It was gorgeous!

I have to admit that everything was just wonderful. And my day went off without a hitch. However, I still feel that the coordinator has some leaks in her communication and organization. I was told several different stories around availability of space and locations of use. Minor details. We also stayed the night in the honey moon suit which did not have our champagne as promised nor the chocolates. Small details but would have really made my rating a 5 instead of a 4. Great locations to get married. Easy access for guest to stay the night as well. Great packages that make the stress of planning a long distance wedding easy!

The view point lawn was a lovely place for the ceremoney. Trina, the wedding coordinator, was very helpful and patient throughout the whole planning process. She was available and flexible for any changes that were needed and there were many. I had both my rehearsal and reception dinner at the hotel an both were wonderful. The wait staff was on top of everything and made sure everything ran smoothly. Carlos, captain of the bell staff, was amazing! He made sure every detail was taken care of! I was very happy with my experience and would have my wedding at the Columbia Gorge Hotel again if I could do it again!

I would have loved to get married at Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River, but the price per head was way out of our range.