My wedding planner experience..... ADVICE FOR ANY BRIDE Part 1 | ExpatWoman.com
 

My wedding planner experience..... ADVICE FOR ANY BRIDE Part 1

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EW NEWBIE
Latest post on 19 June 2017 - 13:44

It all begun when we met Louay. At first he seemed very talented and understood all our requirements. We have already found the venue and paid for it so needed him to arrange everything else.
Little did we know we were in for the biggest stress and mistake of our life.
The amount of things that went wrong prior, during and after the wedding is hard to count.

1. He gave me his details and told me to whats app him anything I see and like so he keeps getting more inspiration and basically getting to know me as the bride better. Majority of the time he would not reply to any of my whats app messages or calls for days although would be seen online, later to come up with excuses that he was traveling, sick, busy with something else, and that is if he would answer.

2. I asked him for help to find a suitable make up artist. He mentioned one that I could never get through to, after asking louay for help on reaching him, he again disappeared leaving me looking for a make up artist again on my own.

3. Closer to the wedding day i started getting very agitated that i did not know how the backdrop, stage or anything would look like, and when spoke to him about it (after weeks when he found some graceful time to answer) he replied that we have no backdrop and it was canceled based on my husbands request - my husband was sitting next to me and was shocked because none of that happened and my husband believed a stage can't be there without a backdrop and in general my husband was trying to make everything the way i dreamed it to be.
Mind you not, first time I met Louay i gave him my scrap book which was filled mostly with the backdrop ideas. Apparently completely ignored.
When my husband spoke to him he said that no what he meant was that based on how he is designing our stage we would not need a back drop. We decided to let it go in hope to know how would it look like.

4. He collected from us the list of our invites with contact numbers and emails, a month passed and we asked how come save the dates were not sent. To which he replied that he thought we did it and that save the dates are on us and the invitations are on them -_-

5. First invitations made, which mind you not took a while, were careless and reckless, we could have done the same for free, the date on it was wrong including the year and both mine and my husbands names and family names were written wrong. Overall we did not like the design as it looked very cheap but again let it go because arguing with them was just added stress on the other things we had to do.

6. The Dj, biggest horror. Louay made us meet a DJ, very shady guy, when asked where he plays , he looked like he made things up on the way. However, he was half arab half westerner which we though would be of help to us as he would be able to balance the ratio of songs. So we explained to him that our families are a mix of syrian, egyptian and Iraqi however we mostly listen to english rnb music. so first half of wedding PLEASE mix arabic with english but second half just english. Above it all, I personally wrote the list of english songs we want, as well as the arabic, father daughter dance and throwing the bouquet song.
All was for nothing. He played old arabic songs that no one knew at the wedding, so many people told him to change and he kept saying its what we asked for when we didnt, its like he took some one elses list. to the point that he didnt play any egyptian or iraqi songs which were important as my family is egyptian/iraqi and its considered disrespectful. I lost my mind here as my face showed how upset I was, my husband went and argued with him and only then did he start playing a couple of songs I wrote to him about. English songs were not the ones we asked for or if they were it was mainly mixed with trance music. which is what we specifically asked not to play.
To top it all, after the cake cutting was supposed to be father daughter dance, as the DJ and the wedding planner know, I am the only daughter and this was a very important part of the wedding, but the DJ decided to continue the party and skipping the father daughter dance. At this point my fury had no boundaries, i pushed people off the dance floor while dragging my dad and my husband went again fighting with the guy on how could he just make this decision on his own.

7. Cake cutting - complete disaster. before the cutting of the cake, my husband and I retreated to the room because i needed to remove the skirt from my dress and both of us would change shoes. Finding our wedding planner was a mission impossible but after he finally answered our calls he told us that at this specific timing we should go downstairs and we will see him at the entrance and the moment we enter the ballroom the cake will move in with us. NONE of this happened. We went down at the arranged time, waited by the door and because people kept going in and out we went inside, so it looks very disorganized and bad as the people ran at us for photos, while no cake was any where to be seen or our wedding planner. To top it all- cake was taken somewhere and never give to the guests. Lot of people complained as they took it as disrespect.

8. I was getting ready in the assigned with the package of the hotel honey moon suite, my husband however had the wedding planner book him a room for day use just to get ready. The wedding planner said he did and gave him the price, when my husband arrived, the room charge was much higher than what the wedding planner said and for night use and not day use. Obviously as usual the wedding planner is no where to be found and does not respond. My husband had to deal with all this on the day of his wedding on his own, paying extra just to get it over with.

 
 

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