A couple were told their wedding was cancelled just two weeks before the event as their venue was being turned over to house asylum seekers. Dean Turner, 40, and Charlotte Townend, 37, were due to get married in a £7,000 wedding at Hull Humber View Hotel.
Dad-of-four Dean said they'd put down a deposit and booked 28 rooms at the venue back in January, following 21 years together in a long-term relationship.
And they’d both “worked overtime” and missed holidays to pay for dresses, a photographer and room decorations, so they could have the “best day” of their lives. But Dean was left stunned when his planner told him on Thursday that their wedding was now off - and then had to break the news to a tearful Charlotte.
He said: “I think it’s a disgrace. It shows they don’t give a monkeys about anyone - we’ve just been treated like dirt. The wedding planner rang me, but we haven’t had anything else in return. We haven’t even had an email.
“It’s meant to be the best day of your life - it’s the first thing we had planned together - and for this to happen is an absolute joke.
“We are going to look at March now, but we’re trying not to think about it for a couple of days as it’s heartbreaking and frustrating. We worked overtime for this wedding.”
Dean said when he got the call to tell him the ceremony - set for November 11 - wouldn’t go ahead last week, he first thought it was a “prank.” He said: “I got a call from our wedding planner at 8.45 on Thursday morning. He said, ‘I’ve got to cancel your wedding’. I thought it was a joke or a prank.
“He said, ‘The hotel has gone into liquidation’. I said, ‘You can’t cancel my wedding. It’s 14 days away. You can’t do it.’ He just said, ‘I’m so sorry. It’s everyone from this year and next year.’”
Dean added: “The hardest part for me was telling Charlotte. She’s an auxiliary nurse and was at work. I had to tell her over the phone. It’s my wedding day, but for me, the wedding is all about the bride, and she cried on the phone. She also thought it was a prank. She was absolutely in bits.”
Dean only found out that the hotel was going to be used as a hotel for asylum seekers after his registrar's office approached Best Western for a formal explanation. He said: “I had to ring the registrar’s office. Because I did that, they had to give an official letter.
“They said it had been commandeered by the Home Office, starting at five o’clock on the Friday night. There was security going in on the Monday.”
Dean said he was angry that the hotel had only given him two weeks’ notice before terminating his special day. He said: “It’s nought to do with what they’re doing with these refugees and asylum seekers.
“It’s the fact that in one ten-minute phone call they can just come and wreck everything we’ve planned for the year.
“To pay for it, we didn’t even have a holiday this year. It was going to be our big day. There were 20 to 30 people from out of town staying over. We had booked 28 rooms.
“Even now, I’ve had nothing official, no email. All I had is the wedding planner contact me.”
Dean said he’d managed to recoup most of the costs, including £1,200 for Charlotte's dress, £800 on bridesmaids' outfits and over £1,200 on room decorations. But the couple still incurred some irreversible expenses, including the cost of the cake, which he said they would now have to eat at home.
He added: “Believe it or not, we’ve got the wedding cake coming next week. So we’re going to eat the wedding cake in our front room.”
Best Western and the Home Office has been contacted for comment.
East Riding of Yorkshire Council has secured an interim high court injunction to stop the hotel being used for the new purpose.
