I always thought centres renting out halls for weddings would ensure their organization treated customers well. After all, people spend ridiculous amounts of money making the perfect wedding.

Later on this summer, I’ll be attending an all-day wedding at the Pearson Convention Centre with my infant. This means trying to minimize the number of disruptions he might cause during the wedding by finding a quiet place where he can eat, sleep and play. The convention centre has no family room or anything prepared to accommodate me. That is fine; it was a long shot anyways. However they do have smaller meeting rooms that can be rented for $150. That is all the information I have been able to collect from them.

I have gone to their website. It overuses flash, doesn’t give you the option of not using that, and doesn’t even use it effectively. The web designer definitely had the hammer syndrome (“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”). If you want to find any useful information such as room sizes, you must pick the “corporate” link and not the “social” link. Dummy me, I thought weddings were social not coporate events. They do have a contact form to get more information, I’ve been waiting at least 3 weeks for someone to contact me. The only semi-useful information on the website was a phone number that I could have gone to www.411.ca to get.

I did call them and was able to get an e-mail address to a person in sales. We went though 1.5 rounds of useful data gathering e-mail. That was when I found out the rooms were $150. I left off asking questions about the room like, what is in the rooms and how to I book and pay for a room. She responded by saying my questions were getting forwarded to someone else. That person must be on vacation since it has been a week and no response.

If I was in charge of planning an event, I wouldn’t even consider this place. Data gathering is so painful, I could have called other places to get prompt replies.

UPDATE: They did finally get back to me a few days after this. The rooms sound unsuitable and unfurnishable for anything except lectures and dinners.