Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation - Planning a Southern Wedding

Classic weddings are the dreams of many brides and, at Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation, you can plan a perfect wedding on a gorgeous resort with the help of experienced wedding staff. The Nottoway Plantation wedding staff are hand-picked by manager Neil Castaldi and they’ll help you organize the catering and other fine details of your big day. The plantation recently underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation and it is home to more than 60 rooms so that each guest has somewhere to stay.

At Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation, you and your sweetheart will pledge your devotion to each other at your choice of beautiful ceremony sites that will make your wedding that much more perfect. With a fairytale-esque ceremony site, beautiful resort rooms and catering professionals, you’ll have much of your big day covered. Nottoway also offers a full, on-site salon to take care of everyone’s beauty needs, bridal pictures taken by experienced photographers and luxurious elopement packages.
The aforementioned elopement packages at Nottoway include a ceremony under the oaks, a bridal bouquet, a groom boutonniere, a five-course dinner for two with a bottle of wine or champagne, one night of Deluxe accommodations, a breakfast buffet for two and several other wedding essentials. The bride and groom can also choose additional package add-ons to better customize their special night. Even if it’s just the start of a week-long honeymoon, the Nottoway elopement package will make wedding night the most memorable of all.

Outside of the elopement packages, Nottoway also offers basic wedding packages. Whatever the bride and groom decide on, a wedding at Neil Castaldi Nottoway Plantation will be one of the most memorable days of their lives, and everyone in attendance will appreciate the fairytale setting.
​

Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation - Louisiana Cuisine

If you’re staying in a Louisiana resort like Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation, one of the best ways to explore the state is to head out in search of local foods. Your resort room is the perfect basecamp for food tourism, and looking for a state’s best foods will often give you the most genuine experience of its culture. Spend time wandering between Louisiana cities like Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Lafayette, and ask locals where you can find the best restaurants.

Gumbo is a regional favorite in Louisiana, and it varies from thick soup to chunky stew with chicken, seafood, wild game of Andouille sausage. If you can find gumbo with authentic Louisiana Andouille sausage, which is made from a Cajun blend of pork meat and pork stomach, you can experience two culture staples in a single dish. Beignets are another local favorite, and you’ll find these deep-friend pastries at cafes and coffee shops around Louisiana.

During your adventures away from Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation, consider seeking out Boudin as part of your food tourism. Boudin is a stuffed Cajun sausage with pork and rice, and it’s a common on-the-go snack that you can enjoy during a city stroll. Also, don’t forget to sample the state’s seafood. Most of Louisiana’s seafood is caught the same day you eat it and sampling local catfish, crawfish or crab is a luxury that you won’t want to pass up.

Lucky for travelers, Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation offers several Louisiana favorites in its own gourmet restaurant. The restaurant’s menu changes based on the daily catches and you’ll know that you’re dining on some of the state’s best creole cooking.
​

Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation - What to Do in New Orleans, Louisiana

When you stay at Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation Neil Castaldi, you’ll be close enough to pay a visit or three Louisiana’s largest city, New Orleans. New Orleans, or NOLA, is often called “one of the world’s most fascinating cities,” and no Louisiana trip is complete without seeing some of its sights. With a culture-rich state like Louisiana, it can be hard to pull yourself away from wherever you’re staying to make time for sightseeing, but doing so will be worth your while.

For example, you could get lost in Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation for weeks, enjoying the calm waters, guided tours, delicious food, masterful decorating and luxurious accommodations. If you do this, though, you’ll miss out on all that New Orleans has to offer. New Orleans has hundreds of sights to enrich your Louisiana stay and many of them don’t cost a dime to enjoy. For example, you can grab a book and soak up the sounds at Jackson Square before you start a gallery hop through Julia Street’s Arts District. After lunch, you can take a walk down Royal Street and browse the boutiques and art stores. Before heading back home, you can enjoy an educational tour of the NOLA Brewing facilities and then listen to some free music at Le Bon Temps Roule music club.

These are just some of the many things to do in New Orleans during you Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation stay. You can also browse shops in the French District, stroll through Audubon Park, watch sailboats on Lake Pontchartrian or learn about looming on Chartres Street. If you don’t want to plan anything, try catching a cab to the middle of New Orleans and walking around for a few hours to soak in the sights and sounds before heading back to the resort for a spa treatment.

Blog | Nottoway Plantation Neil Castaldi

Blog | Nottoway Plantation Neil Castaldi

Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation - Why Visit Louisiana

Exploring the United States is always exciting, especially if you’re able to stay in places like Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation while you travel. The Nottoway Plantation Resort is Louisiana’s largest plantation, with 53,000 square feet of floor space, and it’s the perfect central hub for your Louisiana adventures. You’ll want to set aside at least a day to explore the plantation itself. Nottoway was built in 1859 by John Hampden Randolph and it’s awash with historic sites like Randolph’s Ballroom, the Grand Pavilion and the Randolph Family Cemetery. Nottoway offers tours of the property to make your appreciation for its history convenient, too.

When you’re not exploring Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation, though, you’ll want to see the state. Louisiana is a diverse state that is influenced by Italian, French, Spanish, Irish, German, Lebanese, Hungarian and other cultures. These cultural influences shine through in the places, people and attitudes found throughout the state. Luckily for travelers, they also shine through in the food. Creole cooking is one of the primary reasons that people visit the state and travelers often say that you haven’t tried seafood until you’d tried it in Louisiana.

If culture and good food aren’t enough to make you want to visit Louisiana and experience a spot like Neil Castaldi’s Nottoway Plantation, the state has even more to offer. It is one of the US’s most affordable travel destinations. In addition to world-famous cities such as New Orleans, which is one of America’s oldest cities, Louisiana also offers spectacular nature. Swamp tours, hikes and scenic drives are some of the favorite ways to experience Louisiana’s flora and fauna, and they’re just as affordable as the rest of the state’s attractions. 

Neil Castaldi of Nottoway Plantation - Effective Management in the Hospitality Industry

Neil Castaldi of Nottoway Plantation has come to understand that management in the hospitality industry is a delicate balance of agility and empathy. Maintaining agility to respond to dynamic customer and operations related issues are essential skills to the effective manager. In addition, empathy must also be practiced every day as it allows one to connect with team members in a deep and genuine way.

Customer service and in effect, the hospitality industry can often be a reactive profession. Responding to customer dilemmas or resolving operational issues are a daily challenge as a manager in the hospitality industry. As a result it is of vital importance that a manager be agile, responsive and dynamic in the way they create solutions throughout the organization.

Correspondingly, empathy is another essential skill to possess as an effective hospitality industry manager. One must possess tremendous empathy to understand team processes as if they were standing the same shoes of their Front Desk Agents. Having a deep understanding of a hospitality organizations processes is key to developing this empathy, however where experience is lacking, one can approach their team with confidence and compassion to create an empathetic approach to managing the organization.

The values of agility and empathy are key to success as a manager in the hospitality industry. By practicing these skills, a manager will be able to multitask, project manage and grow their team to create an outstanding organization of people. Neil Castaldi of Nottoway Plantation has done this first hand at his various hospitality ventures over the last 35 years. 

Neil Castaldi: Trends in the Hospitality Industry: Going Digital

In the new digital age, e-commerce has emerged as a new and exciting way for customers to interact with business. This has affected the business industry in a meaningful and deep way, something that hospitality services has not been immune to. According to Robert Rauch, President of RAR Hospitality  there will be what he calls, “renewed focus on property websites”. This means that now more than ever, hotels and restaurants will be trying to get customers to book and make reservations online. Robert even predicts that it will be, “the most important parts of a marketing director's job”. This is due in large part to the vastness of the internet. By making booking and reservations available online, it not only makes it more convenient for the customer, but also available to a wider range and spectrum of people.

Recommended Read:  Neil Castaldi – Hospitality Tricks: Good Management

One effective way to get more bookings or reservations in the hospitality industry is to make it available online. Robert Rauch believes that by creating and generating fresh and interesting content, keeping consistent with new promotions, and staying connected with consumers, hotels and restaurants will be able to generate more bookings and reservations than ever before. By providing interesting media and ways to entertain and captivate the public, businesses and brands can connect to consumers in more meaningful and intimate ways. This in turn generates more trust and familiarity with a brand, which often leads to more usage of the brand’s products.

The Nottoway Plantation of Neil Castaldi is a resort that is always looking for new ideas and innovations.