Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel (Killiney Castle)

I am delayed in leaving this review as I thought that my opinion may change on some of my areas of criticism the more time had passed since our wedding. I wanted to make sure I was leaving objective feedback.

When we first started working with the venue, everything seemed great and we quickly booked our date and put a deposit down. Later on as we started to sort out details on the wedding, it became very difficult to work with them or receive responses to questions. There were several instances in the year leading up to our wedding where we waited over a month for answers to basic questions, had to send several follow up emails before receiving a response, or had to call directly to request a response. There were also multiple times where choices and plans we had made, communicated to the venue, and confirmed over the phone were not documented and were completely forgotten. We grew so concerned with the constant communication issues that we flew over from our home in England to meet our coordinator in person. That meeting was more assuring, however not even 2 weeks later that coordinator left the business. We had to reconfirm multiple things again with our new coordinator as if there hadn’t been notes left behind.

The communication did not improve before our wedding and so we attended an in-person meeting the Monday before to reconfirm everything in person. Despite this in-person meeting where we went over everything in detail, the following things went wrong:
* The menu we were told would be available for our night before dinner was not and the restaurant manager was very rude to me when we questioned why
* The ceremony room was set up incorrectly
* They set up a projector in our reception room at the request of one of our groomsmen without getting approval from one of us. We had communicated to all guests that we were having an unplugged wedding and having to tell the venue to remove the projector and deal with the individual who requested it being upset created unnecessary stress on the day. It was completely unacceptable to make changes to our room set up without our approval.
* The centerpieces were not what we selected
* We selected drink of choice for toast drinks, the bar staff poured Prosecco for everyone and when we told them that was not what we had chosen they lied to us and said that all of our guests ordered Prosecco (they did not).

Ultimately, there were just a lot of times we did not feel valued as customers at all and we feel we didn’t receive good customer service, we thought that it may have been because our guest count was only around 80. We recognize that we were not a huge wedding, however most of our guests stayed on site and they likely had significantly higher revenue from the hotel rooms booked by our guests (40+ rooms for 2+ nights) than in an average wedding from a non-international couple.

Despite the issues described above, our guests had a great time, the food was good, and the space was really nice. We did appreciate that the venue put the cost of guests who couldn’t make it towards our bar bill.

If you do choose to host your wedding here, you will need to make sure you have help on hand to verify everything that they are doing is correct as there is clear communication issues between the events team and the other staff and even if you double and triple confirm everything with them beforehand, there may still be issues.

I was surprised that we never heard from the venue after our wedding asking for feedback or thanking us for our business, as I did from all other vendors. However, I do have records of all of the communication issues saved and much more detailed notes available if management would like to review them.

We had an intimate wedding in this hotel and the process was great from start to finish! The organiser who we dealt with was professional and very friendly and helpful. Due to unfortunate circumstances there needed to be some late changes and the hotel were so helpful and kind. The day itself couldn't have been better, every one of the staff were fantastic!! The guests all commented on the fabulous food. Everything ran smoothly and we were able to just fully enjoy our day. I would recommend to anyone looking for a personal and beautiful place for their wedding.