Gary Sent on 05/08/2019

5 out of 5 rating

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Amazing and fun venue

If you want an wedding that is unique, Scarborough Renaissance Festival is the place to go. Their wedding package are all-inclusive and make planning a wedding very easy. Cherie is amazing to work with and very responsive.

User3539135 Sent on 06/28/2018

4.9 out of 5 rating

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4.5 out of 5 rating
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We had such a great experience having both our wedding ceremony and reception at Scarborough Faire. Cherie was wonderful and helped plan every last detail. We chose the Royalty package to accommodate a larger amount of guests and it worked out perfectly. They supplied a beautiful harpist for the ceremony and reception, a wedding cake, and an incredible assortment of food and drink. As with any outdoor wedding, there is a risk of poor weather and it happened to be pouring on our wedding day. Despite the storms we enjoyed every moment of our wedding at Scarborough Faire!

The only thing I would've changed is the frequency of actors that visited our reception. Two women came into the pavilion THREE times and sang Itsy Bitsy Spider... it's become an ongoing joke with everyone there because it was actually really irritating to everyone.

+5 photos

Lisa Sent on 05/12/2014

4.9 out of 5 rating

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4.5 out of 5 rating
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This was a one stop shop, All inclusive, package deal great for the bride, or couple, that wants to feel like renaissance royalty on their wedding day. It is was perfect for me!! They have vendors they work with to provide services for the wedding so I just had to make a few key decisions and they did all the rest. I was not the type of bride trying to get bogged down by decisions, choices and details, I wanted things to be light-hearted, fun, and airy, and I was tremendously pleased with the outcome!!!

Katrina Sent on 05/25/2010

4.6 out of 5 rating

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The best thing I can say about Scarborough is that on the dayof our wedding we barely noticed the staff at all. Everything was so flawlessly cordinated by the staff there that we didn't have to worry about a thing! Their wedding package includes almost everything you need: the cake, officient, music, flowers, ceremony, reception, and catering. Our wedding was simply beautiful! Thank you Scarborough (Ginger Brown in particular) for making our wedding one of a kind!

Cherri P. Sent on 02/19/2019

3 out of 5 rating

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all or nothing

I am having a small wedding here in April, 30 people. I don't want to spend $3000 on a package. The smallest package is extremely limited, you can only bring in a cake and have a family member hold it until the wedding is over. It would be nice if I could serve my guests a drink with my cake. Otherwise, my guests have to go buy their own food and drink and eat it in the pavilion I rent for 200, if they can get in line, get their food, and walk back in less than an hour. At least have some cups with a water cooler or provide a bottle of water for each guest.

Hannah Sent on 07/31/2018

2.6 out of 5 rating

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3.5 out of 5 rating
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1.5 out of 5 rating
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My husband and I love the Renaissance fair and it made sense he wanted me to have my dream wedding there.
Emails and phone calls were speedy enough and all seemed going well.
Until the day of the wedding itself.
We had absolutely horrendous weather. An ice storm, in April. My photographer was sick so I ended up scheduling photos for next month. We got a thunderstorm during our photo shoot in May.
My problem isn’t the bad weather itself. It’s the complete unpreparedness on the part of the Ren fair team. All you get is some shrugs, a nervous giggle, and a strong feeling that they very much wish you would just disappear and not be their problem anymore.
Do not get this venue unless you are absolutely sure you can control the weather. If weather is bad, there is no indoor option for the guests, and the dressing room for the girls is a tiny cramped shed with no heating and barely enough room for adults to stand up in.
Wedding dresses are expensive and have enormous sentimental value. The weekend of the thunderstorm I saw another bride sitting on a bench with her mom, fighting tears, while her dress was a foot deep in mud. No staff members visible within a mile, of course. Her dress looked even worse than mine did. All I could do was stop by and comfort her, telling her I understood how, even though the wedding was still beautiful etc, she was disappointed about how she had been treated by the venue.
The musicians were marvelous when they did show up but they showed up late. The king and queen made an entrance and it was spectacular, making up for the annoying jester who wandered in uninvited. My biggest complaint was the wedding coordinator, who did absolutely nothing to help me or my bridesmaids except make ABSOLUTELY SURE we were out of that dump of a dressing room on time. She did not communicate with us that a cannon was scheduled at 1 pm, so our ceremony got interrupted by a cannon going off.
Could have been so much better.

Jennifer Sent on 04/30/2011

1.4 out of 5 rating

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This started out seeming like a good idea - almost everything is included with the wedding package, plus tickets for our friends to enjoy a day at the Renaissance Fair until the actual wedding. It began smoothly, we were assigned a wedding coordinator named Ginger who answered emails and phone calls within 24 hours, finding out answers even if she didn't know them off the top of her head. But then she left (for reasons unknown to me) and we received 2 different letters naming other people as our wedding coordinator from that point, saying contact them in future, but not having any contact information in the letter. This new coordinator, Erica, was completely inept. She was never available on the phone, did not respond to emails until often 2 or 3 emails later of me asking for the same information and up to a week after I inquired. The list of musicians I was originally told would be available in February did not get emailed to me until March and again, only after many inquiries from me and a week waiting for the coordinator to call me, which was her original answer. To make matters worse, the week before the wedding, I still had not received my parking passes and the coordinator called me at work saying she had forgotten to put postage on the envelope to mail them (I was supposed to receive them the week before) and started trying to demand up front payment for the 88 guest tickets, even though I had it in writing that the guest list I had turned in was for reference as to who would be allowed in, but I should only be charged on the day of the wedding for guests over the 50 included tickets who actually showed up. The coordinator got very huffy with me and the conversation ended with her we would HAVE to sort this out later and hanging up. I called my sister because she had previously had to contact someone over Erica's head to get the needed details about delivering the cake (Orvis) and she ended up making phone calls herself to get someone to admit that I did NOT have to pay for the overflow tickets and I should not have received that phone call. I never got a direct apology for this myself. Of course, they weren't done making things far more complicated than they needed to be. The Friday before the wedding, I was in the car on the way up to Waxahachie since I live in the Houston area, and I get another call from the coordinator saying I needed to come by the fair sometime before 5 to pick up the parking passes (which they had still not bothered to mail!) so I felt it was a good thing I was already on the road as I would not have made it in time otherwise. THEN she proceeded to tell me that even though we had paid for music at the reception and the ceremony that the bands we had chosen had shows to go through so basically we were out of luck, I was going to get only 1 hour of music after paying for 2 hours. When I asked her point blank if that was what she was saying, that I was just getting screwed out of what I had paid for, she transferred me to someone who transferred me to someone else, and at that point I was getting upset so my fiance took the phone and talked to them while he drove. For him they offered the compromise that we would get a third band to play the other half of the reception, an option they certainly didn't offer me and which I don't really feel made up for them waiting until the last minute to tell me I had to give up my choice of band. They also told him we would get a carriage ride around the fair between the ceremony and the reception as a way to make up for the music. Just so you know, I have been going to Scarborough as a Renaissance festival since 1996, I have seen the whole grounds and a bumpy ride around in a carriage that was difficult to get in or out of in a long dress does not make a good exchange for an hour of hearing a band you actually enjoy. When we finally got to Waxahachie, I went straight up to the fair to try and get the elusive parking passes and there is no one there and the coordinator isn't answering her phone so I leave a message and head on to my hotel, still without passes. A few hours later I still hadn't heard back so my fiance called repeatedly until he got a person on the phone and went to get the passes a second time, returning with them in the envelope still marked postage due proving Erica never bothered trying seriously to mail them. So skip forward to the next day, the actual morning of the wedding. We were told that the flower garlands for my bridesmaids would be available at Rosie's Posies and we would just go by and pick out the ones we wanted at our leisure as my name would be on a list. So we go straight from having our hair done and the woman at the shop informs us we have to have someone from the wedding planning team down there to sign for them. I try calling our coordinator from my cell phone but as always, she doesn't answer. My father at this point was very irate with the wedding staff, having heard what they did while I was driving there and the billing dispute earlier in the week, so he told me to go ahead and get my lunch and he would track down a security person to get someone down there for the flowers. He told me the guy tried to argue with him that I hadn't been told about the music "on my way" because it had been the day before, despite my father pointing out that I had been driving from Houston had they bothered to ask. For those of you keeping score, in the week before up until 2 hours before the wedding, they had managed to upset the bride, bride's parents, bride's sister, and the groom. At this point, I had resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to get the sort of easy but enjoyable package I had paid for so whatever else they were going to screw up was really too late to do anything about. The reception started out very awkwardly with people standing around waiting on someone to get drinks for the toasting and the King and Queen to show up. For a group that has supposedly been coordinating weddings for many years, it came across as being very disorganized.
Now before I let this go as a completely awful experience, let me say the few bright sides of things that earned them what points I felt I could give. Our officiant, Craig, did a good job of directing the rehearsal and the wedding itself, getting us started on time and giving people their cues to keep the wedding flowing. He had helped edit the ceremony and made a few phone calls beforehand to make sure things were going to run as I hoped. He also took the time to speak with our photographer to help him get the pictures during the ceremony. Also Renaissance Productions provided a truly magnificent cake and was there to make sure we were able to get the first piece cut. Everyone seemed pleased with the food and it was a relief on my family that they did not have to do all the cleaning up except for taking away presents at the end of the evening.
The highest rating I gave Scarborough weddings was on value - I have had enough friends get married recently to know the sort of prices that many wedding venues charge so for $4500 to cover location, officiant, music, flowers, and food I could have done much worse. But the headaches they created needlessly in the run up to the wedding, I am reminded that sometimes you get exactly what you pay for.

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