Boal Chapel And Memorial Gardens — Cemetery in North Vancouver

Reviews of Boal Chapel And Memorial Gardens

• Jake

  Added 2016.09.05

  THANK YOU!
• Christopher

  Added 2015.05.13

  Monday to Saturday 8:30am to 5:00pm
• Andrew

  Added 2014.10.13

  It's hard to give this business even 3 stars let alone 5 stars because the U.S. company who now owns Boal Chapel seems to have not not spent any money on their technology in years. I gave them 3 stars only because the Chapel and what they now call the Memory Garden, are still lovely but you need to finish reading this review before you decide to trust this service provider to handle your loved one's memorial or funeral. Grieving consumer beware! The server that runs their entire computer network was down twice for long periods of time during our two week memorial planning time. How does anyone effectively run a business today when their computer network is unreliable? This means, for example, that emails with photo attachments being sent to create the Memory Cards etc were lost and at times, even when the server was operational, they still went astray! One of us spent hours & hours perfecting a beautiful Audio Visual presentation following the employees exact how-to guidelines including testing them on their equipment two separate days prior to the big day. However, during our actual event, our presentation did not work properly! Their antiquated technology (20 years old?) failed us. The audio portion of the presentation did not work and so, the guests sat in the dark, silent room while the employee hopelessly tried to re-start the presentation a couple of times. We also had a photo-only slide show put together for viewing on the two TV's in the reception area and the Foreman Room. Unfortunately, those TV's are so old (15 years old??) that they had to be retrofit with flash drives to play "visual only photographic slide shows" which they recommend to us. It is great idea but the retrofit flash drives don't seem to work very well because those slide shows didn't work properly on their TV's but did when tested on newer TV's and computers. Also, Boal Chapel asked to handle the Obituary for us so we let them but then they didn't proof-read carefully resulting in my Mom's name being incorrectly stated in one of the Obits and it went to press that way! Kudos to them for re-running it with the correct name, on their dime though. Although they collected a large sum from us up front, they were very quick to request payment for a small amount of money for some random service they recommend be added. On a number of occasions, I responded "don't worry, you'll get paid." It felt like getting paid is the most important thing on their agenda. In their defense, the employees are very nice and quite patient but each of them could pay better attention to detail and every one of them should be revealing the truth about the crappy AV equipment to grieving families: Boal Chapel's technology is not reliable and should not be trusted or used. After the event, I wrote a kind letter outlining our compliments but I also constructively stated our disappointments. Their response was non-committal and dismissive hence this tell-all review. All they said is that they 'planning upgrades sometime in 2018' but I also have it on good authority that this is very unlikely to happen. Think this is a one off? Think again. I was at memorial there in December and they also had technical (different) problems that spoiled their service, too. When we first met with Evelyn, we told her "we were at a service here in December where the music could not heard during the service. We do not want that to happen at our service." She told us that it was caused by a staff member and that the problem had been fixed but not so. Perhaps, they have chronic technical problems coupled with improperly trained employees? Hard to say. In closing, I will say that despite the technical disappointments caused by the out-dated technology and/or lack of understanding on part of the employees, our service was lovely because we had 90 of our close family and friends in that beautiful venue to give our Mom the loving send-off she deserved. We just wish that the audio visual portion of the program either worked perfectly or didn't happen at all.
• Austin

  Added 2014.08.18

  The grounds are lovely - well kept, attractive and tranquill. ALL the staff were thoughtful, helpful and respectful.
• Justin

  Added 2014.07.14

  We couldn't have asked for a better place or more compassionate people - it certainly helped us through a difficult time.
• Grace

  Added 2013.08.31

  Our Funeral Home and Cemetery Administration hours are:
• Kyle

  Added 2013.07.05

  Our Memorial Gardens are also open Sundays.