Extraordinary Weddings and Events Reviews
Reviews
We're all about trust. Our community relies on honest reviews to help you make those big decisions with ease.
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![Sean]()
Sean Sent on 01/23/2025Really really good!
Lura is an expert in her craft and took amazing care of us as we are sure she does with all of her couples. Our wedding was turned into an extraordinary day that we will never forget, and we have Lura to thank for bringing all the pieces together. We will say, not one time did we ever feel like she had any other client other than us. That is very special! -
![Sava]()
Sava Sent on 08/10/2024Great experience
Lura and her team provided us with expert advice on handling our DIY wedding venue. They were there to help coordinate all vendors professionally and executed our schedule of events perfectly. The day was truly stress free and we got to enjoy our wedding party! It is clear that they truly enjoy what they do and they do it well. Would highly recommend! -
![Angela]()
Angela Sent on 08/20/2023So thankful for Extraordinary Weddings
Lura is truly extraordinary. This wedding would not have happened without her support and expertise. This year was extremely busy and chaotic as we moved to Los Angeles, got a puppy, and I started business school while working full time. People wondered how I could juggle wedding planning on top of everything, much less at a venue up north. It's all thanks to Lura. She not only found the most beautiful and magical venue of our dreams, but she made the wedding planning process so smooth (and even fun)! She has wonderful relationships with top notch vendors (and builds strong ones with vendors we introduced to her), always has a solution, and is extremely organized. We truly enjoyed getting to know her in this whole process. On the wedding day, everything was executed perfectly by her and her team. It says a lot when guests told me after the wedding that they had the opportunity to meet her and that they thought she was incredible. We are going to miss working with her but know that she will make other future couples so happy! -
![Annie]()
Annie Sent on 07/04/2023Fun and Stress-Free Wedding Planning Experience!
I can’t recommend Lura enough! She helped us plan our 120 guest wedding this year in Geyserville, CA. Throughout our engagement leading up to the wedding, Lura guided us through the planning process in a fun and stress-free way! There are so many little details involved in planning that she flawlessly handled for us behind the scenes, which was amazing as it made wedding planning not a full time job for me. She was a great confidant and had wonderful advice on all of my questions. We were also really happy with the recommendations for wedding vendors that she gave us.
On the day of our wedding, it was unexpectedly raining (in May – who would have thought). Lura went above and beyond to execute our original vision of having cocktail hour and dinner outside in a stunning vineyard at the venue. Her philosophy is that the couple getting married (and their families) should feel like guests on wedding day. The Extraordinary Events team made that happen by taking care of every detail – including managing any difficult guests – so that we could be truly present to enjoy our big day. Our wedding day was beautiful and so memorable thanks to her team! -
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![Pri]()
Pri M. Sent on 02/05/2020A great person to have on your wedding team!
Lura was so lovely to work with! Enthusiastic and organized during every call and meeting, and completely dedicated to creating a dream wedding experience for us and our guests. We are so grateful for her expertise and guidance, and just her general support and kindness during such a special time in our lives! If you want to feel like a guest at your own wedding, book with Lura and let her give you the fairy godmother treatment! -
Wendy Sent on 11/11/2019
Amazing, professional and all in all a perfect experience
We were new to Sebastopol last year when we began planning our wedding. My fiancé and I are 70 years young and just needed someone to help us since it had been decades since we had a wedding.
When we met Lura that day in Starbucks I was a little reluctant but as soon as she started talking to us I knew she was the one we wanted to ensure our day would be perfect.
She and her team were seriously so great. She would always assure me everything was on schedule and just fine when I would freak out.
It was totally seamless, professional and we had one one ounce of worry on our day. We felt like guests at our own wedding. She stayed the entire time and at the end of the night you would have never known there was a wedding in our backyard. It was spotless inside and out!.
Absolutely recommend....they are a 10 out of 10 -
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![Lynne]()
Lynne Sent on 11/06/2018Extraordinary Weddings - Lura Albee is amazing!
Our daughter's wedding was at the top of a mountain at a winery where everything had to be bussed up and set up. Lura was able to carefully coordinate all of this, and pulled it together with style and grace. She was professional in helping us to negotiate with vendors, and had great experienced suggestions that aligned with our vision. Her relationships with the winery staff and caterers as well as the professional way she managed them led to a successful event. Our wedding had a high degree of difficulty, and Lura worked to make it an beautiful success! -
![Adena]()
Adena Sent on 05/15/2017Lura from Extraordinary Weddings was incredible. I was a budget bride trying my best to do it all myself, and when I got too overwhelmed and out of my league, Lura came to the rescue. She totally understood my vision for our wedding and brought it to life so beautifully. Her motto of "Be A Guest At Your Own Wedding" was fully and completely honored-- she made sure we had all our ducks in a row so that I didn't have to do a single thing other than enjoy our day. She graciously allowed some of my eager family members to pitch in and help, and those family members and other wedding guests alike took the time to let me, my husband, and our parents know how impressed they were with Lura's efficiency, effectiveness, and calm demeanor throughout the entire process and I could not agree more. A complete professional, I will recommend Lura again and again! Thank you, Lura! xoxo -
![Alexis]()
Alexis Sent on 11/03/2022Simply Magical
We have known Lura for the past 3 years since this crazy pandemic wedding planning roller coaster. She’s like wedding family. She helped us roll with all of the changes and we ended up having an amazing wedding. After so much buildup, it exceeded our expectations and was simply magical. Thank you to Lura & her team for helping us to find our vision and enjoy the day worry free. -
![Stephanie]()
Stephanie Sent on 09/07/2023Unfortunate Experience
Regrettably, my husband and I cannot share a positive experience with Lura from Extraordinary Wedding and Events.
Our association with Lura began when we hired her services for our June 2020 wedding, which, as we all know, had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Approximately 1.5 months before our rescheduled wedding date, we found ourselves faced with some questionable business practices that ultimately led us to sever ties with her prior to our big day.
Our initial encounter with Lura took place at a wedding fair in Napa, where she appeared enthusiastic and eager to collaborate with us. As she was also featured on our venue's preferred vendor list, we decided to move forward with her month-of coordination package. However, as time passed, she became increasingly elusive, and her responsiveness to our inquiries noticeably slowed.
Around the two-month mark before our wedding, we met with Lura at Encore Rentals, an appointment that seemed promising overall. We left feeling optimistic about the partnership. During our meeting, Lura assured us that she would promptly provide us with a contract and pricing details. Unfortunately, when more than a week passed without any communication, I reached out to her for an update. Her response came ten days later, via Aisle planner, revealing that she had received a quote from Encore, including the cost for Encore staff to handle the setup and breakdown of 280 chairs and 11 tables, which totaled $3,298. Her company offered to undertake the same tasks for a mere $1,680. This raised red flags for us, and a closer examination of the actual contract from Encore revealed no specific estimate for setup and breakdown. Upon contacting Encore directly, they confirmed that these services were typically done by Lura and her staff and therefore not included on their contract with her clients. They however were willing to provide us with a new contract specifying the set up and break down cost which was ONLY $855.25! In essence, Lura's quote was an egregious overcharge, about four times the actual Encore cost, and her team's quote was twice as high. While I understand that it's not uncommon for the wedding industry to mark up services, it should always be done with transparency and honesty.
When we confronted Lura about this issue, her explanation cited personal family matters, recent pricing changes at Encore, and an inadvertent copy-pasting error from another contract. While we empathize with personal challenges, it's crucial to maintain professionalism in business dealings. In the end, my husband and I felt that we could no longer trust that Lura had our best interests in mind and ended our business with her. Sadly, Lura declined to refund any of the pre-paid funds, despite services not being rendered.
I know I am quite delayed in posting my review, however I feel that my experience is still important for potential clients to know. If you do choose to engage Lura's services, I strongly urge you to scrutinize your contracts and services meticulously. Transparency and integrity in the wedding industry are paramount, and we hope your experience differs from ours. -
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![Murphy]()
Murphy Sent on 06/05/2022Disappointment
~~TL;DR: This is the review we wish we had seen before we hired Extraordinary Weddings. We did not get to “be the guest at your own wedding”, we did not feel like our event was a priority to them, and in the end we felt like we had to do most of the things we were paying them for, plus double check all of their work. ~~
We had a difficult time working with Lura and Extraordinary Weddings. Our experience was that when we could get time face-to-face or over the phone, they were helpful and knowledgeable. However, that time was hard-won, and in between those interactions we would go weeks or months with no input from the team, even as we requested updates or advice. When there were issues or mistakes in the contracts, we were frequently the ones to identify them or make the decisions that would resolve them. The result was that we were left feeling like we had to do the majority of our own wedding coordination, with the added challenge of trying to extract clear and concise information through a barrier of rose-tinted optimism and delayed communication. We hired Extraordinary Weddings (“EW”) to do partial planning and coordination for our wedding plus rehearsal dinner coordination. Additionally, we requested a la carte support in planning florals, rentals, and transportation. EW provided us with a license for AislePlanner as our planning tool, and a list of preferred vendors for the various services we would need for the event. Things started to go sideways long before the wedding.
We met a great florist through Lura, and were assured that EW would arrange a contract for the services we wanted. Unfortunately, that florist had to honor an earlier contract for a pair of weddings that had been covid-posponed onto our date. This is not EW’s fault, but then they never informed us of the conflict. For over two months, we were told that a contract was on the way, until we pressed for more updates and were told that we would not be getting the florist we expected. It’s unclear if EW had been aware of the conflict for some of this time, or had simply failed to put a contract in place until after the postponements, but regardless of the circumstances we were told verbatim “we didn’t want to tell you about the problem until we had a solution in hand”. To her credit, Lura quickly arranged an alternate florist who did a great job. However, it was a recovery that was only necessary because of an earlier communications breakdown.
As mentioned earlier, we were provided with a seat in the AislePlanner software, an incredibly thorough planning and coordination tool. We made this our central planning tool so that we could work collaboratively with the EW team, and relied on it as the ultimate source of truth for our planning, timeline, and contracts. Just 8 weeks before our event, we discovered that our master packing list had been deleted, along with thirteen months’ worth of location information, setup instructions, and logistics for all of the items. We frantically searched AislePlanner for any information on recovering deleted notes, only to be told that it was likely permanently gone. We spent the night recreating the list in a panic (in Google Drive this time) and wondering what items we had left out. When Lura got back to us the next morning, she told us that she had deleted it because she saw the default template at the top of the note and didn’t check if there was any additional content. She said that this had never happened before, because her clients never had important information in these documents so early (???), and that she would see what she could do. It turned out that we were incredibly lucky, and our note was deleted in a period where AislePlanner was testing an un-delete feature but hadn’t yet announced it, so they were able to restore it. Once again, things ended up okay, but we were needlessly stressed out over a crisis of EW’s making.
We had requested assistance from EW with planning the shuttles for our guests, and were told that they would help us. We contacted the shuttle companies EW recommended and made plans and reservations on our own, covering every contingency with the intent to cancel the unnecessary vehicles once we had a transportation plan in place. As the transportation picture became clearer, we started to develop plans on our own, and repeatedly asked EW for guidance to make sure that we were making reasonable assumptions, which we never received. In the end, we set the shuttle timing, routes, and quantities all by ourselves, just ahead of the cancellation deadline for our reservations. After the schedule was complete and the deadline was past, EW chimed in simply to tell us that we had done a good job.
AislePlanner includes an extensive floorplan tool that allows users to plan the furniture, seating arrangements, and general layout of the spaces in their event. EW’s default timeline recommends submitting final layouts to the venue 3-4 weeks before the event, but the layouts were never taken past rudimentary outlines with wildly out-of-scale furniture (the exception to this was the dinner layout, which we had produced ourselves so we could plan our seating chart). In the final week, we had to produce our own layouts for the actual ceremony, the reception space two ways (for cocktails and dancing), and modify the dinner layout after discovering that the space was 24 feet shorter than our schematic had shown. EW attributed the lack of venue information to the venue’s event manager, but she was never invited to be a collaborator on our AislePlanner project and would have had to communicate schematics with Lura through email. Even on the wedding day, we walked the site of our own accord and found that the ceremony space had been set up with the seats pushed so far forward that there would be no space for the wedding party to stand, or the first row to see past them.
Our rehearsal dinner caterer went on vacation for an extended period, returning just before our event. This was fine, because we had corresponded with them many months before (with Lura CC’d) when we set up the contract, so they knew where to go, what the setup was going to look like, what staffing was necessary, and the other relevant details. EW hadn’t attempted to establish any of this information with the caterer (whose information had been stored in AislePlanner since the contract was signed) until 9 days before the event, so they were greeted by out of office messages.
We expected EW to do the rehearsal dinner set up, clean up the space, and prep the rentals for pickup the following morning, as this plan was reflected in (1) several emails between us/EW/the venue owner (2) the final timeline that Lura had signed off on, (3) verbal confirmation as such on several occasions. When we showed up to the venue 1.5 hours before the event, almost no setup had been done. Our photographer (!!!) ended up setting the table for Lura instead of capturing photos of our rehearsal (which we would have loved) which started about 20 minutes later than planned. After the setup was completed and the rehearsal was run, Lura left the venue. At the end of the event, we expected to see the EW team as the caterers started packing up, then the bartenders left, and finally it was just us and the wedding party for a full three hours after the scheduled cleanup time. After it became clear that nobody was coming, the wedding party cleaned up the space while the venue owner called Lura to figure out where her team was. The answer was that EW had expected the caterers to do the cleanup and breakdown, and left after setup without confirming this. To her credit, Lura left her home around midnight and drove an hour to personally come stage the rentals for their scheduled pickup, but it was another exceptional save on an unforced error due to poor coordination. She stated later that she did not know why we expected her to do setup/breakdown (despite confirmations as above).
Any one or even a few of these issues would have been understandable as part of the wedding planning process, but all of them together (along with other lesser problems) left us stressed and disappointed. When we could get Lura to focus on our needs she was quick to bring solutions, but many of the issues only existed in the first place due to failures in communication. By the time we realized the scope of the issue it was too late to find a replacement coordinator, and we were left feeling like we had to constantly perform tasks and double check work that we had paid for EW to do. When things went sideways they were always quick to point the fault elsewhere, and when we expressed our displeasure they were surprised that we considered overseeing communication and logistics to be the responsibility of the coordinator.
The motto at Extraordinary Weddings is “be a guest at your own wedding”, but you will not. You will be the coordinator, the designer, the planner, and you will have to fight every week for their attention, even on a six-figure event. All of our guests thought the wedding was wonderful, but we had to put so much effort and stress and legwork into the process that we were hyper-aware of every flaw and deviation from a plan that we had largely produced on our own. We had beautiful moments, but our memories of the day will always be colored by stress that led up to it and the knowledge of every gap between the plan and the reality, and that’s something we can never get back. -
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