Review of Oak Bay Beach Hotel 4*

My husband and I got married at OBBH earlier this month. While the ceremony site was stunning, we wouldn't recommend having your reception here. There are so many costs/fees that you wouldn't think to look for when booking your wedding. For instance, the corkage fee is an outrageous $35/bottle. The cheapest bottle of wine is $46. The cake cutting fee is $3.50/slice. If you don't get all the rooms in your block booked, you're on the hook for those. We also were not impressed with the customer service we received. Given that we had spent such an exorbitant amount of money to have our wedding at this hotel, we were incredibly disappointed with the attitude we received from the banquet manager. First, our cake cutting experience was extremely sub-par. We had two amazing cakes, but they only cut one. They served TINY slices (seriously, we had TWO cakes — they didn't need to be so small), and not everyone received one (though we paid for everyone to receive a slice). They started serving the cake, coffee and tea while my mom was giving her speech, cutting in front of the podium and loudly asking people if they wanted refreshments. I can understand that they were on a time crunch, but it could have been done in a much more graceful and discreet way as to not distract guests (and the bride and groom! ) from the mother of the bride's very meaningful speech. Finally, the next day, nobody from the hotel told us that there was leftover cake. We left the hotel (and drove out of town), before we even thought to ask. We then had to contact 3 different people (being transferred on the phone a ton of times) before someone finally went to the kitchen and found the second cake, and a tier of the first cake. So we had to drive all the way back to OBBH to pick these up, with no apologies from anyone. When we brought this experience up to the banquet manager, she initially blamed my wedding planner ("It's unfortunate that we weren't told that we needed to cut the second cake" — Well, why else would we have a second cake?! ). It wasn't until I expressed my disappointment with her customer service that she apologized. When you pay almost $500 for a service (literally JUST a service), you expect more than this. At the end of the day, we had a beautiful wedding and I'm happy that we used OBBH for the ceremony site. Everyone seemed to have a great time. Proceed with caution if you plan on having your reception here, however. Feel free to DM me with questions if you are considering OBBH for your wedding.