Does Anyone Use Custom Venues?

Yes, I have 2. 

• Glimmerbrook Elixirs and Brews replacement Custom Venue
• Gibbi Point Prospector's Paradise Biodome Custom Venue

But I have this issue [AA] Custom Venues being treated as Getaways when not on Getaway | EA Forums - 12705800.

I use the Elixir and Brews also as my Spellcaster Throne and Hold Court there. But I can't have dates there X /

So far done the cooking contest with downloaded lot, worked surprisingly well. Tweaked settings (and the lot)  a lot tho. 

The lots look fab and I'm guessing they look even better in-game. I hope the issues get sorted.

I never even thought of doing a cooking contest. Which Lot did you use?

I used this..  but heavily edited it, as done with MOO and routing errors in my game. Also needed to reduce number of fridges to make it work. But I really liked how mine ran, and I have no custom venues altering mods atm. 

No because I don't really know how it works & if it's possible to combine a Cafe' with an Outdoor Party Place with a Season Festival using the Custom Venue.

Occasionally, I do, but not very often. Some Downloaded Lots are really beautiful, though.

I made one custom Venue, think it is on the Gallery. I took the university bar and made a small spa beneath it.  The spa has early morning hours and the bar runs from the afternoon till about 2 oir 3 am.  It works pretty well.  And when the bar tender is not there your sim can practice on it if you want.  I like that sims show up certain hours for the spa now, and your own sims can choose what they want to do.

i also downloaded a custom venue dealing with Jungle adventure.  I use it like a hotel.  I downloaded it onto a Tomorang lot close to water.  I had to tween it a lot, but except for food not always being cleaned up it works ok. There is a pool  that works well.

This reminds me of Sue's Secret Kitchen in the Sims 2! I used to love taking my culinary sims there.

I made quite a few when I first got the pack. Spent hours setting up hotels, day care, work places and so on only to realise that I couldn't use them.

• The staff doesn't count as employees, so they can't go into rooms with doors locked employees only. 
• Eat food = cooking, so the stove and refrigerator was always blocked by the guest meaning cooking staff couldn't access the things they needed to cook (which brings us back to number 1). 
• Staff kept leaving their duties to do other things, like start work out classes or go swimming in the pool even if that was not their task. They then didn't change back to their uniforms. 
• My sims family members kept showing up as staff in spite of having perfectly good jobs (again staff does not equal employees and therefore it's apparently not a job). 
• Restrictions that staff had to be local to the world wasn't enforced by the game, even when I made sure there were townies with the proper skillset and fullfilled every requirement. 
• When trying to hold a wedding at a hotel I realised that custom venues can't host events. 

Right now I've disabled AA as I play a pack challenge, and if/when I enable it again I guess I will try again, but no, I was definitely not impressed with how they worked. Not worth the time they take to set up. I suppose if they're used exactly the way the game makers envisioned and you don't mind only meeting the same people over and over they might work?