Tài Khoản Khách
ngày 14 tháng 11 năm 2022
A dispute around moving our wedding indoors to appease new concerns regarding noise complaints from neighbours came to light in July 2022. This was just a few weeks before our wedding in early October 2022 and threatened to derail the whole event. In the remaining weeks before the wedding, Madrid-based management exerted lots of pressure on our wedding planner to move it indoors, despite it being far too close to the event to make such changes. Other couples we spoke to were able to move more easily because they had not committed to marquee hire. Shortly after checking in on the day before the wedding the management started to hassle us again, arguing about the level of soundproofing that could be achieved by the material of the hired marquee, temporarily blocking its setup, followed later by hostile calls that evening from their ‘corporate’ team to apply additional rental charges for ‘unapproved events’. In the first call a staff member from the ‘corporate’ team demanded that the small group of family members who had arrived for a barbecue be sent home and the barbecue scrapped. This further dispute culminated with the arrival of 3 armed police officers before lunch on the Sunday after the wedding who were sent at the request of a member of the Madrid office. The officers formed a semi-circle around me at the doorstep, offered no translation other than ‘problems with contract’ and I was passed a card reader by a housekeeper while she spoke simultaneously to the man from Madrid, following his instructions and passing information to the officers in Spanish. I made payment for the disputed additional rental charges and the officers eventually left. The experience was horrible. We remain appalled, as were our guests. If it was done with the intention of intimidating us and upsetting us, then it succeeded. The purpose was to extract an additional 847eur, on top of the 5800eur rental already paid to fulfil the contract prior to arrival. In the words of a member of the local event team on one of the many calls, “usually when we do this to the couples they just pay”. It’s such a shame because we would have been OK with the additional amount if it had been made clear in the original agreement but it was not, it was never part of the agreement. The manner in which we were pressured before and during the weekend was also not what we expected when we booked the wedding on a lovely friendly tour of the property in October 2021, done by the local staff, promising a space without any noise restriction, “you can have the party as late and as loud as you like, look around, there is nobody to disturb”, gesturing to the vast open space of the farm and surrounding hillside. But the key thing is that it’s not the lovely local staff who make the decisions, it is done from Madrid. That team are completely focused on keeping the neighbours happy and to ensure the ugly museum structure being erected behind the Cortijo gets completed. We found it all pretty awf
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