“We have a crisis!” A petite young woman in a sleek pantsuit is on the phone at the reception desk of The Wedding Chapel inside Mandalay Bay.
Something is going wrong with the ceremony being held in The Gold Room. But if Ada Casanova, the assistant manager of The Wedding Chapel, can’t fix it, then tall redhead Colleen Kestel, Director of Weddings, can.
Like the time when a bride gained weight and busted the zipper of her wedding dress minutes before the ceremony. Kestel phoned the hotel uniform department downstairs and begged them, despite liability issues, to fix the dress. They acquiesced and the wedding went forward only 20 minutes behind schedule.
The reception area at THE wedding chapel at Mandalay Bay.
Or the time when a bride’s friend had a morbid fear of velvet and refused to sit on the velvet-covered chapel chairs. Kestel swooped in with a piano bench.
Kestel, 29, and Casanova, 26, are consummate professionals. Largely thanks to how they treat their clientele like VIPs and their around-the-clock-above-and-beyond work ethic, The Mandalay Bay Wedding Chapel was voted Best Wedding Chapel on The Strip 2008 by Las Vegas Bride and The Knot magazines.
Around 1,800 happy couples say “I do” inside their chapel every year. For Casanova and Kestel, this translates to seven days and 60 hours of work a week, fielding hundreds of emails and phone calls a day, and of course, dealing with a million special requests and the sometimes silly demands of bridezillas, groomzillas and mothers-in-law.
During the months of preparation before a wedding, it’s usually the bride and surprisingly often the groom who bombard the duo’s Blackberries at 2 a.m. with emails about how they changed their minds and want to completely overhaul the floral arrangements.
On the day of the wedding, however, it’s the groom’s mother and the maid-of-honor who cause the most trouble. “They feel the need to step in and take control and it becomes a pain in the butt,” says Kestel. “We’re trying to do our job and they’ll step in front of us and say, ‘Don’t you think we should do it this way?’”
But Kestel and Casanova have a policy: treat every single bride as if she was your best friend and every meeting like a lunch date.
This "Everyone a B.F.F." policy has earned Kestel and Casanova sparkling reputations and is part of the reason why their desks are lined with thank-you cards.
“They keep in touch because they think of you as the person who orchestrated the greatest day of their life,” says Casanova.
Casanova has dealt with her share of eccentrics, including a couple of professional glass blowers who had the minister christen them with Red Bull “to give them energy” and a gothic couple with a transvestite maid-of-honor.
But despite all the hassle and hard work, Kestel, who would like to someday own her own wedding planning business, and Casanova, who would like to branch out into hotel administration, love (almost) every minute.
“I like the end, the outcome, seeing the peoples’ faces, seeing them really happy,” Kestel says of her favorite aspect of the job.
Casanova agrees: “I love getting to know the clients, meeting everyone in the family, following through to the end and sealing that relationship. I still keep in contact with brides and grooms. It’s a really rewarding job.”
“Plus wedding stuff is just fun, looking through the magazines with everybody,” continues Kestel, who is in the thick of planning her own wedding, which will be held on April 17th.
Her groom, coincidentally, is an architect who helped design and build The Wedding Chapel. They met when he came in to check on “some architecture stuff,” and Kestel caught his eye. Casanova will be a bridesmaid. Last weekend they partied through a two-day bachelorette extravaganza. Kestel is visibly glowing with bride-to-be giddiness.
“I totally get it now because I’m planning my own wedding,” Kestel tells me, seated at her mahogany desk covered in hardbound wedding planning books, bridal magazines, calendars, papers, manila folders and a couple coffee cups. “Even the smallest thing can set you off because everything could fall apart. Crazy bridesmaids, dresses being lost, invitations not being sent out.”
Casanova just smiles.
Previous Discussion: