A Nightmare Post-Wedding Event:

Our Experience with Nelson Fernando Acevedo Ossa at Botswana

April 26, 2024

My husband and I had the misfortune of working with Nelson Fernando Acevedo Ossa for our post-wedding event. Initially, we consulted him as a wedding planner but felt more comfortable with someone else and declined his services. When our budget allowed for an additional event, we decided to work with him to host it at Restaurante Botswana. We regret that. The problems consisted of items missing from our quote, dangerous food handling that could have hospitalized our guests due to shellfish allergies, and a terrible performance which was meant to be the entire focus of the event.

Nelson originally promised to refund 50% within days of the event and broke that promise. When my husband requested a full refund, he stopped communicating with us. After involving a lawyer, he renewed his agreement to refund 50% of the event over 8 months on the condition that we take down our review. We declined the arrangement. Here are the full details of our experience, which we hope will inform others who might consider doing business with him and are considering trusting him with their special moments.

The event was a post-wedding celebration, the day after our wedding. My husband had always wanted to host a fire show, a performance where a group would dance with fire on the beach. It was something he loved since he was a child and he shared his vision with Nelson, who assurred him he would have an excellent production. Although we were uncomfortable with Nelson saying to trust him without confirming details of the performers, we moved forward. He quoted us 8 million pesos (about $4,000), and we would have to bring our own liquor since the bulk of the budget would go toward renting his venue, food, service, and most importantly, the show. It was a lot of money for us, as we had barely enough for our honeymoon, but we were convinced it would be a fantastic ending to our wedding.

On the day of the event, Nelson assured us he had hired the exact performers we had shown him for reference, which seemed impossible because he never asked for their information, and they were in another country. He insisted, and we moved on with the evening.

We started sensing things were going wrong when we noticed items we were quotes for were missing. The toilets were malfunctioning, out of paper, and did not have “aromatic candles.” Our guests were sweating and covered in bits of tissue due to the lack of “linen napkins” we paid for. On the beach, police with bright emergency lights startled our guests and informed them that they were not allowed to be so close to the water and that the owner of the venue should have informed us and demanded to speak with him. Later inside, the guests were very hot and hungry when Nelson asked if it was time to serve food. As we mingled with our guests in the food line, we noticed they were mixing meat and shellfish, which 6 of our guests were severely allergic to. We felt we couldn’t enjoy ourselves as we needed to supervise the food service. Nelson asked the chef to cook new meats, but by then, one of our guests refused to eat out of safety concerns.

Then came the worst spectacle we could have imagined. We waited in the dark until finally, the “performers” stumbled out onto the sand still fixing their outfits, two of them on stilts with water bottles containing some sort of fuel. They seemed afraid of fire, kept wobbling back and forth, completely uncoordinated, spitting propellant, dropping their props, and nearly falling. The main performer spent a large portion of the performance balancing plastic chairs rather than doing anything with fire, while the men on stilts waved their batons up and down. It was clear Nelson had not hired the performers we wanted, and it appeared these men were not accustomed to fire performances at all.

My husband's anxiety skyrocketed, and we both wanted to leave. I encouraged him to try to smile and clap so that our guests wouldn’t see our emotions. When it was over, he walked off to the beach, unable to face them. His parents went after him, and shortly after, Nelson arrived. He said it was not his fault, that he was lied to, that he was also a victim, and that he would try to make it right. His mom shouted that it was a garbage performance and the performers seemed more like drug addicts than artists. After the confrontation, my husband walked off and had an anxiety attack, collapsing in the sand.

When he made it back to the restaurant, many of our guests had left without him getting a chance to say goodbye, as some had early flights back to other continents. It was about midnight, and we spent nearly two hours ferrying our guests in the only two taxis his team had acquired, as the location was difficult to return from. He refused to see Nelson out of absolute disgust, so I spoke to Nelson with his parents and he promised to make it right. Shortly after, we went on our honeymoon. My father-in-law cried with anger during a phone call a couple of days into our vacation after hearing that we were struggling to enjoy ourselves because of how upsetting that last night was. It took us 13 years to have that wedding, and it was the worst ending we could have had.

In his last message to us on WhatsApp, Nelson admitted to feeling ashamed, said, "I cannot agree more with you on the feeling of helplessness of having had to witness something that was not expected," and ended with, "I assume all responsibility and I hope to compensate for all this in some way not only now with this commitment made but also the next time you come to Cartagena." Since then, my family followed up with him as the days he said he’d start paying came and went. He started giving excuses for not having the money and eventually threatened to sue me, claiming my husband threatened his life when after the show on the beach, in a very emotional state, he said, "the only thing that would have made the show better better is if the roof caught fire and ended it”. Nelson claimed that we enjoyed it because a few people clapped out of courtesy. He said we stayed for most of our contracted time (we contracted until 3 am) despite knowing that since midnight we were just ferrying our remaining guests back to their hotels. In other words, he refused to take responsibility as he said he would. While waiting for the taxis, my husband offered a tip to our server and assured him and the bar staff that we did not blame them for the negative events of that night. The server refused the tip, saying he was a right hand man of Nelson and could not in good conscience accept it after the way things turned out.

Nelson would often try to flatter us by calling us “beautiful family” and “beautiful couple,” and constantly refers to himself as a man of God. Yet, he continued to lie when our legal counsel sought him out via a friend. He told her that we made him look bad when we went to Cartagena the first time, that he set up a meeting with us for wedding planning and we left him hanging. Our messages show that we informed him very politely that we were declining him as our wedding planner within a couple of days of speaking, before we even went to Cartagena, to not waste his time. Diminishing our experience, he told her that we live in Orlando and were expecting a Disney production like we’re used to (we do not live in Florida, have never seen a fire show at Disney, and he had videos and photos of the kind of performance we wanted - he even claimed he hired them). He said we refused to give him our payment details - our records show that he received all the information he requested immediately. Most hurtful of all, he told her that we only contracted him because we felt bad for treating him poorly. My husband was the only one who wanted to give him a chance, and we kept our word that if we had an opportunity to host something at his restaurant, we would.

What we experienced was a total lack of professionalism. He frequently references how many weddings he’s done, but we and others do not have countless opportunities to try again. We all hope to only get married once, to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and we trusted him with the closing of ours, with our sendoff to the many loved ones we rarely get to see and spend time with. We trusted him with something 13 years in the making. It’s a small comfort to us that at least we did not trust him with all of it.