Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City

After attending a wedding at the Hilton Universal City a couple of years ago, I knew I wanted to be married here when my time came. I checked out a few other possible locations but ultimately returned to the Hilton Universal City. The hotel was very good at touching base with me regarding ceremony and banquet details and returned e-mails promptly. They had difficulty, however, with taking automatic payments from us. When we signed the contract, we also authorized the hotel to take payments from a designated credit card and a payment schedule was set up. Said payments, however, were not taken, unbeknownst to us (since we'd set up automatic payments, we didn't see a need to keep a close eye on this) until the hotel contacted us two months after our first scheduled payment was supposed to be made. We worked this out, but the situation arose again, and it got to the point where we were required to make frequent payments in a short amount of time, rather than spaced out, as we wanted to do it. This was a bit financially burdensome. My hotel contact was very patient with me in the days leading up to the wedding, as I sent quite a few last-minute e-mails and made some changes. My contact even showed up the morning of the wedding to make sure everything was okay. The ceremony was set up beautifully, the service at the banquet was wonderful, and the food (the little I was able to eat :P ) was tasty for the most part. I had a very nice time at my wedding. It wasn't until after the wedding that I realized some things and others were brought to my attention. 1) I had requested high chairs for a guest with two small children, and they never materialized. The children spent the evening in their strollers. 2) I ordered three vegan meals at an extra cost and these meals never appeared. 3) My gift box was broken into, and while this wasn't the hotel's fault, when we asked if there was security footage the day after the wedding, the hotel told us they don't keep the footage that long. This was particularly upsetting, as it just sounded like an excuse--why bother having security cameras if you're just going to erase the tapes right away? Overall, I enjoyed my day, but I was disappointed to realize after the fact that the Hilton Universal City did not perform as well as I thought it would.

Where do I begin?!? Just some of the problems: the A/C wasn't working during our wedding (which we had warned them about), the bartenders were rude to our guests, the catering director wouldn't return any of calls/emails for months, they charged us for every little thing possible, they wouldn't even serve our guests water for the first 1/2 of our bar, and I can go on and on. Uggh...I'm still so bitter at them!!

The reason why I love our reception site was because I wanted to have Chinese food catered. They offered that cusine so I was able to have a very East meet West wedding. I was also able to incorporate many of my different wedding culture as part of the wedding. They had a nice ballroom and great area for the cocktal hour. The venue was also very easy to get to and the sapce was very spacious.

The Chinese Banquet was amazing, especially since it wasn't at a Chinese restauarant. The coordinator, Yi Tan was also great to work with!;Keep track of when your payments need to be made - you won't always get a reminder ahead of time.