We got married here in October 2023 and I wish that we’d taken notice of the bad reviews of the managing director Suzie Bailey. On so many occasions in the process of organising the wedding, Suzie was overbearing, judgemental, patronising and ultimately became unapproachable, wearing...us down.
This was extremely distressing for me at times, during what should have been an enjoyable process of celebrating the joining of two families. We were told in the sales pitch that it would be fine to tailor our wedding day to make it feel more personal in terms of food, entertainment and music. We had asked about this specifically as we wanted to include some cultural aspects commonly used in Chinese and Japanese weddings. But many of our very reasonable requests were met insensitively and, at one point, we were even lied to about why one of our requests had been denied. Things eventually got so bad that we were going to pull out 6 weeks before and find another venue but we were tied into the contract and would have lost a lot of money (£15,000+).
We understand that Tudor Barn is a listed building so has some restrictions on what you can do inside the venue and on the grounds. We also understand that Tudor Barn is a profit-making business and has a very limited list of approved caterers and suppliers who, under Suzie's instruction, are limited in what they can provide. There is no way around this, as we found out when every Asian caterer we suggested was prohibited by her. Even after complying with all the venue’s rules as a listed building and paying the necessary commission and service fees, it felt like Suzie was exercising an abuse of power to deny our requests for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
In my experience, whenever we had a concern or request which we wanted to discuss, Suzie was quick to shut us down and deferred to saying that she has been managing weddings for the past 15 years and has 200 clients a year. There is a small team of wonderful operational staff available on the day but ultimately Suzie controlled every aspect of our wedding planning and we were repeatedly made to feel like we were being too demanding and unreasonable.
I’m sad that what should have been a joyous once-in-a-lifetime process caused us so much stress and I regret having our wedding at Tudor Barn. To save other people the same regrets, if anyone would like to speak with me directly, please get in touch as I am happy to discuss why our experience was so unpleasant and give you an idea of things to watch out for before you commit to having your wedding here.More
