Sara was helpful as a wedding weekend coordinator, but I would not recommend her full-service planning package. I didn’t receive support in a number of the areas I was requesting i...t—especially managing tasks and deadlines—and communication was not as consistent as I needed it to be. A number of times, Sara didn’t reply to my email for more than a week and I had to follow up to see what was going on. Once she was sick; once she missed my email. Given that the support we hired her for depended so much on email communication, it was difficult to not hear back or know whether she was working on the tasks I had asked for help with.
Most recently, she hasn’t replied to me for over two weeks about a wedding shuttle charge that was $800 more than the quote. I reached out to the transportation company myself, who told me that Sara had requested that they work 2.5h beyond the 6h we had talked about. Extending our time definitely should have involved checking with me. Equally frustrating, I’ve reached out to Sara asking to discuss, but I haven’t heard a single thing from her. I understand that miscommunications happen, but I paid $800 more than I wanted to, and the right thing to do would be to talk about it.
Sara helped connect us with vendors and set up meetings with them. When our rehearsal dinner venue seemed like it might fall through, she reached out to several alternative venues (unprompted) and quickly provided me with a list of what they could offer.
However, in general, I didn’t receive the planning support I wanted and asked for. Early on, I requested a list of what needed to happen by month. I never received this, nor any proactive messages from her suggesting what we work on next. I felt I had to manage the process, which is exactly what I had wanted help with. Six weeks out, I asked for a to-do list of all remaining items. This was the email she missed, which I know can happen, but she should have been proactively reaching out with the things we needed to work on next—and losing a week at this stage put more pressure on the remaining weeks. Ultimately, she sent us a list of planning questions, but it didn’t include things like when we’d need to order décor for it to arrive in time. I also asked for a combined list of payment deadlines, which she never delivered and I had to put together myself. Honestly, it felt like we had a long list of things to do and we didn’t really see Sara taking initiative to help out.
I expected better organizational structures as well: we had long email threads in which it was difficult to find relevant details. I set up a Google doc with sections for each item, which was a much more effective way to collect information. That’s the kind of thing I would have hoped a planner would take the lead on.
During the wedding weekend itself, Sara was present and helpful. She managed all the vendor arrivals as well as the shuttle buses, and expertly pinned all the groomsmen’s corsages (which they were helpless to do themselves). She set up the reception space beautifully, moved flowers from the church to the reception, and moved them again from the reception to the Sunday brunch. She was there to tell the procession members when to walk down the aisle and smooth my train. On Sunday, I didn’t have to do a thing: I just showed up and everything was ready to go.