617 Palafox Wharf Reviews: Pros, Cons, & Website Analysis

Before I begin, please note that I had an outside wedding planner. I feel like my experience would have been slightly better if I would have gone with the in-house coordinating, but not enough to give 4 or 5 stars.

In the beginning of the planning process, I made it clear that I had a lower budget for the venue and wanted a stress-free wedding planning process. I was given 2 days to go over the contract and decide in order to save my date. Given the location, views, and price for just the venue, we went with Palafox as it was a better price compared to the other venues we looked at.

Sandy is great with covering every nook and cranny of what is needed in a wedding, but we (my wedding coordinator and I) felt like we had no control in our planning. On top of my planner keeping up with her own internal plans/info keeping, Sandy wanted us to give them every contract from other vendors, every small detail included in the wedding, and to keep up with the website she created for us. Every week there was an email that I felt obligated to answer even though I had hired a planner for her to communicate with.

In the contract, it states that you must use their in-house rental service for anything that you rent (big furniture, big decorations, arbors, chairs, linens). This wasn’t a big deal until we receive the pricing. There was no way that they had the best deal for rentals. An arbor, couch, flower wall, and reveal doors were almost $2,000 for the day. Linens to rent were $1,000 and had extremely strict rules. This just did not fit with me wanting a low budget wedding, and it should have been brought up knowing how I felt about our budget. Thankfully, we were able to work out a deal for our arbor, but we weren’t able to bring in any decorations. The venue is beautiful enough to only need minimal decorations.

One of the biggest headaches was the week of the wedding. My planner submitted our final timeline. We were going to use 2 hours to set up, 5 hours for the event, and 1 hour to clean up. Sandy wanted to charge us $400 for using an “extra event hour” even though the contract states that we were paying to use 8 total hours “which are flexible, but consecutive.” She stated that they were going to “give me the hour for free as a wedding gift.” A caterer on their vendor list also had a few issues. The caterer asked me to move the food up in the timeline so they could leave the venue by 9:30 pm or I could keep them until the end of the wedding but pay for an extra hour. We went with having the caterer leave an hour early. It was brought to our attention that the contract states the caterer should stay until the end of the event so that management could supervise and approve their final cleaning of their area. Sandy told our caterer to not give us any deals and to charge me the extra hour. To me, that was a slap in the face. About 30 minutes before our end time, Sandy was starting to clean up, picking up chairs, and basically kicked us out about 10 minutes before our actual time. The rest of our vendors, my friend who is also planning her wedding here, and her vendors have all said that they do not enjoy working with their management.

On a better note, the venue is very beautiful and charming. As a Pensacola native, it captured where my husband and I grew up very well. Our guests enjoyed the venue and scenery.