My review here is based on my own experience. As all girls do, I was dreaming about the time when I will get married that the planning of my wedding will be full of love, happiness and exciting time for me and my fiancé. In order to make sure we won’t get caught in all this wedding stress preparation we decided to hire wedding planner to work for us. And the compensation for having wedding planner was to experience a stressful and miserable time. I would try to distance myself emotionally from this as a bride and human and I will try to write this review from being customer perspective. As background, our wedding was around 2 month ago. We hired this company, around 6 months before our wedding, for a full service wedding planner, for which we paid 4340 euro. We hired them because we didn't have the time to properly plan our wedding. But instead of help, I found myself doing a lot of the planning that they wouldn't or couldn't do. Basically, they were supposed to help us with all aspects of the wedding not because we do not know what we want, or we do not have a good taste (as they were saying) but because we do not have much free time.
Our wedding planner was the owner of this company and she was the main person that we had all the meetings. During our cooperation I found our wedding planner to be unhelpful, unprofessional, and belligerent. Although she was polite and bitter sweet to us before we hired her, she even was hugging us at the first meeting (very unprofessional), after we paid her the full amount it was another story, another behavior. In front of other suppliers she was trying to be bitter sweet, but when we were alone ( verbal or writing) she was rude, unresponsive, disorganized, and unhelpful in so many ways for our wedding preparation. I remember one time me and my future mother in law we went to her office she was literally screaming at me. Yes is true and It's terrible to have something so negative surround your most important event. She often seemed really uninterested in hearing any of ours ideas or opinions about our own wedding by saying that we do not have her experience or taste. She would simply tell us how she normally does things, and if I don’t like it is our problem. And if we had an opinion, she would tell me I do not know what I am talking about and that she was the professional so I should trust her or else I will regret it.
She also had zero regard for my budget, being unable to deliver us vendors in several categories that would fit our budget. We gave her what we considered to be a perfectly healthy budget and first of all realistic for us. Before we had the agreement, she said that she will work with this budget. After we’d booked and paid her full amount requested, she said she was unable to plan a wedding for that amount and she just verbal triples the amount, of course without writing down the details. For example, she apparently did not know a single vendor to build an gazebo who charged less than 30,000 euro just for rent. After a long research me and fiancé we found one, When we said that we found our vendor with half of money from what she said to buy not for rent then she decided to give us an offer from someone with around 10.000 and again with the option only for rent and with no access to their contact info by saying that is secret.
Another example is the wedding invitations, we were told to do nothing about that at the time we hired her because she is having this under control. The time passed and we needed to order the invitations so we went to her vendor. Our dream was to have invitation with laser cut. She provided one single vendor that did not had the option for laser cut and told us either we take it or we have to find an vendor on our own because she didn’t know any vendor that could full fill our expectation. This situation created a long delay for us in order to send to our guests the invitation. Me and my family were thinking that she was trying to give us every time no choice, either we do it her way or we are going to regret it. My only regret here was that I worked with her. I hired several vendors on my own because she could not offer any at price points we could afford, and she basically refused to work with them, btw our contract with her did not say we’d hire only her vendors, she was definitely supposed to work with anyone we chose with no comments, after all this is why we hired a planner in the first place. Saying comments, it comes in my mind that she talks/write a lot without making sense or productive for our wedding. So, I encourage the readers to do their due diligence and perhaps go the extra mile and check references with other vendors that the wedding planner works with before hiring them. The internet provides a wealth of information but, unfortunately, much of it goes unchecked and is often exaggerated or worse, totally fabricated.
When I suggested cost saving ideas by founding on market other vendors e.g. for Tents , she told us that she is working only with one vendor and the one I have found might not be professional. Then when we said that we are taking our risk because we have good reference on him , she would simply not be responding to our request because she does not work with non-professionals. I got totally confused and frustrated, For one more time I had to do it by myself, she did not wanted to meet our new vendor and to close the deal.
We asked also for design inspiration or any ideas to make our wedding interesting and unique to us, she would tell me to just use Pinterest of other designers and everything come with the right cost. We never received any ideas with an specific budget. And, use Pinterest is not what I would expect from full service planning. She also messed up several things with our wedding day timeline, that she did not want to fully provide on time, which thankfully I caught in the days before my wedding. When I brought this to her attention, she said when the time is right we will have the wedding timeline and was again belligerent with me for questioning her. She was so rude to me on multiple occasions that basically one day I stopped replying to her emails because I got tired of being berated by her. Finally, when we wrote to her that we do believe that based on the facts of our cooperation she won’t be capable to manage all the vendors on our big day, another big surprise come from their side that instead of trying to make the things right by us she just said that is time to finish our cooperation. After that, we realized that we need to concentrate only on our wedding and to leave this unfortunate cooperation behind. And we did so, and our wedding was amazing. While everything worked out in the end, I realized that it was not worth the anxiety and sleepless nights. That single thoughtless act caused entirely too much drama and angst in the few days far from wedding planner that it took to resolve all my problems.
All our friends and family who knew the situation were asking us why we didn’t fire her immediately, the truth is that we hoped that she will cooperate and she will make right by us, I was saying all the time that we are humans and sometimes things are not going under control so we were thinking to give her the option to correct their business behavior by us but this never happened. I also hated to lose the money and to spend time to hire someone else, that eventually where to happen anyway. After the wedding I’ve approached them by asking 50% refund that we think it was appropriate in order to end our cooperation somehow nicely and to leave it behind us. But again, the response was negative with no wish from their side to fix our professional relation and to make right by us. Hopefully, They will take our feedback into consideration and provide a better experience for future brides. I hope that my true story will help other couples and especially bride to be.