Peckforton Castle, Cheshire - Prior June 2006

My experience at Peckforton Castle was as follows:

They seemed to be understaffed

Receptionist appeared to be having a disagreement with other staff

my room was booked to other wedding party (i was the bride!)

food cold at breakfast

had to set up my own table

I experienced poor organisation

3 different wedding planners

bridal room not cleaned properly rubbish from bride day before

not aloud to take paid wine into other room

apparently increased food bill at last minute

dust in room so could not hang dress up

toilet made clanking noise

room next to disco night before

tv remote didn't work

the list goes on... cant be bothered but the only thing that i can say was photos looked nice, but big day did not feel special, enjoyed my honeymoon the best.

When we booked our wedding at the castle, we were told that our guests would have access to rooms on a first come first serve basis. We were also told that because we were booking so far in advance, that all 32 rooms were currently available. As such, we gave the castle our credit card for a deposit. Our guests immediately attempted to book rooms and all were denied after the initial three. We spoke to the castle staff an immeasurable number of times who stated that they had a great number of rooms available, but were saving them in case another wedding wanted to book. The staff was reportedly in constant contact on the matter with the owner. The castle's final offer to us was to see whether or not rooms were available two weeks prior to our wedding and we would be allowed to book those rooms at that time. In the end, we obviously could not have wedding guests fly internationally and have no place to stay. So, we were forced to cancel our wedding.

Ultimately, we lost our deposit.

Peckforton Castle - My boyfriend planned a romantic evening this summer where he planned to propose to me however we were very disappointed when we arrived - what looked like a luxury hotel turned out to be a seemingly dark, dingy one. We thought the upgraded room was disappointing with a rickety old 4 poster bed, dirty walls and curtains and appeared so dull and depressing. The food was ok in the restaurant but again we disliked the interior and found the staff seemed unhelpful to us. I thought the bar smelt like an old musty church and I felt uncomfortable.

In my opinion, it needs a few million spending on it to make it nice!

What shocked me is that the price to stay here is the same as some top class hotels.

Well I said yes despite the hotel and we WONT be getting married at Peckforton Castle I can assure you!

Peckforton Castle is in a lovely location, but our wedding was far from smooth. I paid over £2K for our wedding, and it ended in tears.

The bridal suite was lovely, as were most of the other rooms which our guests occupied , but they all said that customer service was at best lacking.

En-route to my wedding (outside the hall) I had to stop, as they had decided it was the perfect time to show round potential brides. I found this to be insensitive, and it kind of spoilt my rush and build-up to the most important day of my life.

During our two nights stay at the castle we had a meal on the Friday night, the food was excellent, considering there was another wedding going on it made absoloutly no difference to the service.

The day we were leaving the staff were preparing for another wedding on the same day, again everything just seemed to flow, there was no signs of panic with staff, they were all very calm and organised.

Would definately strongly recommend Peckforton Castle for a wedding.

Every girls dream of staying in a castle - we had an excellent stay. The hotel was excellent and the food excellent. The rooms are wonderful and we would recommend this stay for every one who wants to be spoiled. The Champagne and chocolates in your room is good value as well couldn't not fault a thing. EXCELLENT*************

Where do I start? Initially the castle was lovely when we arrived although we picked the worst weekend for weather as it rained for 3 days. My boyfriend took me away for a romantic 3 day break.

A wedding was going on when we arrived, which was fine until the disco started up, our room 308 was directly above it. We could hardly hear the TV over Black Lace. I tried to call Reception to enquire about when it might stop but the telephone wasn't working. Went down to Reception, miles away, and they did apologised but said they were full so couldn't change our room and that the disco was going on until 12.30am. They offered to turn it down a little, which didn't happen and offered to reduce our bill slightly for the inconvenience, we were staying 3 nights. This all seemed well and good and we were happy until the last day of our stay.

As it's a remote place, they have a pumping system on their toilets and showers to remove the waste water. We have experienced this in the past and it has not been a problem, unless you put something down the toilet, which you shouldn't.

On our last morning, I had a shower after my partner has had one and I noticed the pumping system seemed to be making more noise than usual. I didn't think anything of it until I open the shower door and I was sprayed by sewage pumping out of the toilet waste disposal unit, it looked like the pipe clip had come off the unit. This was not just shower water and had lumps of excrement and toilet tissue in it. I was covered, the bathroom flooded and it flowed out all over the carpet into the bedroom. The pumping finally stopped but as the phone wasn't working in the bedroom, we had to go down to reception to complain. As you can imagine I was horrified at the flooding room and being sprayed with sewage and I was somewhat in shock.

At reception we were treated politely but not in a very apologetic way. They indirectly inferred that it was our fault. I suspect they believed it was because we had put something down the toilet and found it hard to believe I was taking a shower. I wasn't offered somewhere else to clean up in and we just went to breakfast. To be honest, I was still in shock.

On checkout half an hour later, they didn't take anything off the bill as promised for the first night and took nothing off for me being sprayed with sewage. The attitude I felt was, you booked a cheap rate through Late Rooms so what do you expect when you trash our room too? We obtained a free pot of tea and that was it.

To be honest, that ruined the whole weekend away. My boyfriend didn't want to argue at the desk as he's not really a complainer and he was taking me away for a treat. Personally, I think I should have at least had one night free for that trauma. I am hoping that by posting this information online they will consider who the customer is and that word of mouth is key. I had a friend who was planning to stay but has cancelled their trip following my experience so they have already lost business due to their poor service.

Peckforton Castle itself is nice but a little remote. I would recommend going in Summer rather than Winter, as the walking will be better.

By the way, the restaurant serves good food but it is very pricey. We checked what the main meal came with and were told potatoes and vegetables. When it turned up it came with a tiny dollop of mash, three miniature carrots and two asparagus spears. We had to eat the biscuits in the room as we were still hungry. The house white is very nice though and at £12.50 per bottle it is good value. About the only thing I'd recommend about this place.

I think it's a good venue for a wedding where you only have to stay one night and to be honest, I think that they only really value the wedding business, other guests are a necessary evil to keep the wolf from the door.

If you do decide to go, as there are plenty of positive reviews, and I do hope you have a good time, avoid room 308 as they probably haven't replaced the carpet, which as I mentioned was flooded with sewage and that's a public health risk.

We are having our wedding in Peckforton in 2007 and I have to say so far the staff have been great! I have never had a problem getting through on the telephone and the staff have been more than helpful in explaining the costs to me. We have popped in on several occassions with no notice to the Castle to show relatives around the venue and their only comment was that if there was a wedding in process we would not be able to do this.

Yes the rooms are cold and basic but remember this is a castle which is centuries old - what do you expect!

We have done our home work and spoken to people we trust who have given us their honest opinions! The main comments were the coldness and a bits of waiting around which is usual at a wedding anyway!

My wife and I were married and had our reception at Peckforton castle in October 2005. The day was brilliant, the staff could not do enough and everything flowed effortlessly.

This was in stark contrast to everything that had gone before. I can only echo the complaints of people who have had trouble getting confirmation/letters or even getting through on the telephone. A wedding is a stressful time anyway but when you ring and ring and leave message after message which are never returned it gets extremely frustrating. As an example we waited for over 3 weeks for a letter confirming the time of our ceremony which led to a delay in getting our invitations sent out.

The management may claim they can prove that the phones are always manned by providing times staff have worked, but this doesn't mean that the staff actually answer, as they can be all over the castle or busy with other work whilst sat in reception. They appear to be chronically understaffed, I suspect caused by huge staff turnover due to pressures from management.

You would have thought that if they are all over the castle they would have a phone that they could carry with them or at least an answering machine but this did not seem to be the case.

This may seem quite trivial but it is not what is needed in the run up to a wedding. I would recommend that if you are thinking of having a wedding there you phone up several times and see what your experiences are like. We had several guests stay at surrounding hotels purely because they gave up on trying to get through. How can that be good business??

As for the venue it was a little scruffy in places, and occasionally a little cold but I think that is to be expected in a place like this.

I stayed over on the night before the wedding and myself and the best men did a lot of the setting up of the rooms ourselves which we didn't mind too much. You definitely need someone there on the morning of the wedding, but I suspect that is the same everywhere.

The food was ok if not incredible, although I'd also echo that fact that it was difficult to arrange to try the fayre. I had been led to believe that trying some of the food beforehand was standard policy when making decisions but that did not seem to be the case here.

This leads me on to the claim in the booklet that they provide a "full wedding planning service". If you expect to tell them what you want and sit back and it'll all be arranged you will be sadly let down. We did not expect for everything to be arranged for us in this way, but we expected more help than we received, and also to not feel like we were fighting against them to get things done all the time.

I appreciate that they have a lot of weddings a year so I would not expect everything to be done immediately, but the time things took was ridiculous and I think goes back to the understaffing/staff turnover. For the record we had 3 different "co-ordinators" in the time we were planning our wedding.

Another small thing which I guess is standard but was a surprise to me was that although we had 60 people including 5 or 6 kids we had to pay for 60 full price meals although the kids had the half portions as "we hadn't met the minimum number" as the kids only count as half people i.e.. 55 adults + 5 kids = 57.5 adults....

I really debated with myself whether I would recommend this venue, and overall I decided yes... just.

The day was magnificent, the guest were most impressed and the staff were brilliant but the lead up was unnecessarily stressful due to poor communication.

I can't help feeling that the venue is not living up to the potential that it has.

Having seen the lack of attention to detail, I decided Peckforton Castle and it's fabulous setting would be great for a wedding ceremony only and not for a reception and certainly not for accommodation. I asked if I could do this and was told the only time I could have was for 10am.

She was totally inflexible on this especially, knowing that Peckforton had guests from the night before leaving at 10am as well. My guests would be coming from out of town, so this was certainly not a realistic time. The day was free, so I asked for 12pm and was told if I'm not using the whole castle then no. I had to opt out of having my wedding there at all. It is a real shame. The place has SO MUCH potential, but the current owner has let it fall into a state of dilapidation, through lack of investment. She was certainly not really interested in making the day my big day. I was really disappointed. But happily I have found ROWTON CASTLE, who know how to make my day.