Wedding planning is a complicated thing. There’s a bride-to-be, overjoyed at the reality that she’s found her person and will be getting married, while at the same time, coping with the constant overwhelm of securing a venue, whittling down a guest list, choosing a menu, looking for a dress, and pulling together the money to make all that and more happen. The wedding day, once complete, usually leaves brides feeling as though a weight has been lifted off of their shoulders; memories made end up being well worth the difficulties endured.
But for Tope Ajala, LA-based British-Nigerian travel influencer (known as @itstraveltops), executive in the advertising industry and businesswoman, two months after her Dec. 9th wedding day, she still can’t shake the uneasiness.
“I’m dealing with anxiety and stress,” she tells ESSENCE, the weariness evident in her voice. Ajala, at the time of our conversation, is in the early stages of a negotiation, waiting to see if she’ll be doing battle with the Hilton Worldwide in court after their property in Dubai, the Waldorf Astoria, canceled her wedding 48 hours before it was supposed to take place.
But let’s briefly go back.
“I’m a Black love girl,” Ajala says emphatically. “You have your vision. I’ve had it since I was four years old.”
She’d found the prince required for that childhood happily ever after in Cameroonian-American entrepreneur Lesley Toche. In 2022, after a year of dating, he proposed.
“I didn’t see it coming at all,” she recalls. “It’s so funny, because he always said, ‘Hey, I want to marry you,’ from the first time we met in 2019.”
On a trip to Dubai for her birthday in June of 2021, which included her girlfriends and his guys, 15 people in total, he surprised her with a proposal at the ritzy Shangri-La Hotel. They couldn’t have been happier.
Following the epic proposal, they were ready to go all out for their wedding. After mulling over places, worried about rain in London, the U.S. not providing enough magic and Africa being too difficult due to the need for guests to get Visas and more, they landed on Dubai.
It made sense. They loved Dubai. In addition to the proposal taking place there, Ajala actually lived there when she was in her early 20s, and the couple had traveled there multiple times together. They settled on the luxurious Waldorf Astoria, a space she’d seen years before when calling the city home.
“It was the most private, secure venue,” Ajala says. “The Waldorf globally is always used for high-end, exclusive stuff, and when I did the walkthrough it was breathtaking. They had just remodeled, so the grand hall that we were supposed to use for the indoor celebration, it was impeccable.”
They came in town a week before the big day. The couple wanted to tie up loose ends and work through jet lag in advance. Traveling with their eight-month-old daughter, Ajala’s family were all staying at the Waldorf — until they abruptly weren’t. The Thursday before their Saturday nuptials, they were told their hotel room was being moved. In addition, their wedding would need to find a new venue. The Waldorf had decided to accommodate members of government after making a last-minute deal, and it required all hotel guests to leave the property.
From there, they found themselves having to redo their wedding planning within hours as one thing or another fell through due to the venue loss. “I just had a moment, and I was like, ‘God, if you don’t want this to happen, then clearly this must be a sign.’ I texted my husband, I was like, ‘Babe, I think it’s a sign. I don’t think we’re supposed to have a wedding.’ And he was like, ‘No, we’ve come too far. Let’s just not tell the guests. Let’s just figure it out.’ And we didn’t. We didn’t tell the guests, we just told our bridal party. They were the only ones who knew, which is only 10 of them, thank God, because they did freak out.”
After choosing to forgo her own tears and embarrassment to go into project management mode, which she does best, the hours left were spent trying to quickly find a new venue, traveling up and down Dubai while simultaneously trying to have a pre-planned bridal shower and find some joy.
“Most things were sold out. Most things were unavailable,” she says.
The wedding party, a Godsend for the couple who remained supportive and intent on making sure they married on Dec. 9th, pulled together a list of possible locations. They found the Jumeirah Beach Hotel on Friday morning for a wedding that was supposed to start Saturday afternoon. Ajala and Toche were initially offered the location’s beach club, which wouldn’t have been private. The other option, the lone ballroom available, would have required setup to start at 6 p.m. and have everything conclude at 11. In the end, they were shown an outdoor space on the property and chose to make it work.
But making it work involved more than just saying yes to the space; it included trusting the fare of the chef as there wasn’t time for a tasting. All the Nigerian food they had ordered and were charged for wouldn’t be allowed as outside food was a no-no for outdoor events at the venue. “Apparently the food was incredible so thank God for that,” she says. (Nigerian finger foods were allowed at the after-party penthouse venue the Atlantis Royale had.) The wedding, which was supposed to start at 2 p.m., couldn’t start until 5 p.m. because transfers and transits for the wedding guests were complicated at the new venue, which was 30 minutes away from the hotels guests were at, most resting their heads two doors down from the Waldorf. And the shuttle company transporting those guests had to be found at the last minute after the original company canceled due to the new distance, which they hadn’t agreed upon.
Other things affected include the Nigerian traditional ceremony occurring on the big day. Usually a few hours in length, her ceremony had a duration of 45 minutes due to the scramble to set everything up. “I have no pictures with my parents,” she says about the loss of time for a portrait session with her mom and dad. “There are pictures of us dancing on the dance floor, but it’s not the same.”
For all the snafus, last-minute changes and intense headaches (including the financial aspect, as they had to pull together tens of thousands of dollars, calling their banks for international wires, to cover the new costs of their new space), the wedding day ended up being beautiful. It wasn’t necessarily what the bride had dreamed of since childhood, but with Toche by her side, they were able to make the most of what they were offered on short notice and plan a great celebration. Guests, unaware of all that had occurred until late in the wedding day, took to social media to laud the event, including one TikTok creator who said it was the best, most heartfelt wedding she’d attended.
Ajala acknowledges the bright spots that were there. She thinks destination weddings are still a wonderful option for brides, saying they offer better control over the guest list. She also encourages brides to use shuttle services and keep the location of the wedding and reception private so that if there are any hiccups, like the terror she experienced, you don’t have guests showing up to the wrong place ready to riot.
But the what-ifs still hang like a cloud over Ajala and Toche. And the indifference they say they faced from Waldorf Astoria management can’t be forgotten.
“During that 48 hours, that whole team was atrocious,” she says. “They were terrible. They were saying things like, ‘Clearly you don’t want a wedding if you’re being this fussy with your venue.’ They were mean. They were so mean.”
As mentioned, they are currently in a dispute with the Waldorf Astoria in Dubai and Ajala says says they haven’t received their money back from the Hilton Worldwide. Management initially thought offering seven nights at their establishment would make things go away.
In response, Ajala quickly got her lawyer involved.
“They obviously have a big and more powerful legal team, but I was like, I will do whatever I need to do to make sure that no one experiences this. Because beyond everything else, take the financial, the emotional, everything away, at the core, it’s a bride’s worst nightmare.”
She adds, “This isn’t a birthday party. We have birthday parties every year. This is the one thing you’ve been planning since you were a little girl.”
The bride and groom have dealt with trauma since. “Me and my husband haven’t been able to watch our video back. So while we posted it, we actually haven’t been able to watch it back together, because it kicks off so much pain.”
Tope ended up in the hospital for a short time once they returned home, and the couple had to do individual emergency therapy just to process everything. “We had some difficult moments in our marriage shortly after the wedding. We had nothing left to give each other.”
So while their big day still came together well, the way they should see it has been tainted. Their fondness for Dubai too has shifted. “We wanted to live there,” Ajala says. “While I love Dubai, this is the ugly side of Dubai. You turn a beautiful Black love story into someone’s nightmare. Now every time I think about my wedding, that is what I think of.”