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After the quintessential wedding date of 7/7/07, I posted an item, titled: “How Many Wedding Chapels Does It Take To Create A Herd Of Bridezillas?”
The wedding chapel featured in the piece, was the Las Vegas Garden of Love. Since then, their activities have created more bad publicity for the chapel, and the Las Vegas wedding community.
A few weeks ago, the Las Vegas Sun newspaper printed an article by Joe Shoenmann, titled: Walk down aisle preceded by a walk on the wild side. The article chronicles court proceedings that have cropped from ‘Chapel Wars,’ within the Las Vegas wedding community.
That would have been bad enough; however, this morning, the Sun published an article, by the same reporter, titled: Weddings crashed Strip Resorts, suit says – Chapel accused of falsely using Bellagio and Mirage trademarks.
The suit alleges a number of things, including that the Las Vegas Garden of Love performed weddings on the grounds of these hotels, and used photos and logos of these properties on its website, in an attempt to misrepresent a business relationship with Bellagio and Treasure Island (an MGM Mirage property).
On the face of it, these allegations appear to be an all time low in bait-and-switch wedding marketing. It certainly creates a contentious legal dispute of major league proportions. The full court filing is available for download from the Las Vegas Sun website.
Small wedding business are dependent on their goodwill and reputation within their local wedding community. A single relationship with a major hotel, hotel chain or other wedding venue is worth a boatload of referrals and income.
This lawsuit is a cautionary tale. I encourage you to read it, thoroughly, and share it with every wedding business you know.
Often, small wedding business feel like big business pay no attention to them, and don’t understand their contribution to the success of a wedding event. In this instance, the big businesses are paying huge attention, and not the kind one would want.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
[...] On July 9th, I blogged about the fiasco of 7/7/07 weddings, perpetrated by the Las Vegas Garden of Love Wedding Chapel. At the end of August, there was an update, noting a lawsuit against the same chapel by MGM/Mirage & Bellagio. [...]