Every Last Detail - Professional Wedding & Event Consultants

The only regret I have in my life, is hiring Jackie as my wedding planner. If you are considering hiring her, please read this. My goal here is to educate future brides so they can avoid the problems I encountered and hopefully save you some heart ache. Based on my experiences with her, one could reasonably conclude that that as a wedding planner, she is disorganized, scatterbrained, careless and insensitive. Even in our meetings leading up to the wedding, she would have to ask me the same question multiple times, at multiple meetings. From what I saw, I felt that her notes were a mess and impossible to follow. Even after I typed out everything for her in extreme detail with lists of everything.My fiance's mother had passed away, suddenly, a few years before. I had told Jackie about it multiple times. It was a sensitive subject and I wanted it treated as such. Jackie forgot about her death, on multiple occasions. In meetings with my fiance and I, she asked about his mother, where does she live, what does she do, etc. When it got closer to the wedding, she asked when do we want his mom to come out during the ceremony, where do we want her to sit at the ceremony, etc. My poor fiance was confused and hurt. It was extremely awkward, needless to say. I felt that it was extremely insensitive and careless of Jackie to forget that my fiance's mother had passed away, and to make this error multiple times was astonishing to me. - Jackie took it upon herself to move my mother to the earliest van on the wedding day without conferring with me, and then it was suggested as my idea, when it was not. My mom greeted me at the rehearsal dinner, in fury, because "I told Jackie to move her to the 7 AM van." It then became my burden to move my mom back to a later van and reorganize the schedule, again during the rehearsal dinner. This, to me, showed an insensitivity to family dynamics. - There was no usher the day of the wedding. This was a huge oversight. Never once in all of our phone conversations, meetings in person, did Jackie ever bring up the fact that we needed an usher. When it came time for the wedding party to come out in the procession, no one knew where to sit because there were no open seats left for them (bridal party was supposed to be on the second row). It caused a commotion during the ceremony and stress that could have been easily avoided had there been sufficient planning. - Prior to the wedding, I specifically asked Jackie not to discuss any details to my fiance on the day of. I explained to her that he can get stressed out easily and overwhelmed and if there are any issues, please come to me and not him. Minutes before the ceremony, my fiance comes up to me, extremely upset, telling me that Jackie rushed him and told him it's time to start the ceremony, now. My mom hadn't even started her hair and makeup and would need at least another 20 minutes. This caused an unnecessary amount of tension between my now husband and my mother, when in reality there was nothing to worry about and I had built in time into the day for things like this. - I then confronted Jackie and asked her why she had talked to my husband and pressured him and she denied it all, claiming that he was the one who came up to her. - Jackie and I did a walk through of the entire wedding reception, ceremony, cocktail hour areas five days before the wedding and discussed the placement and organization of tables, photo booth area, welcome signs, frames etc. Multiple areas were set up incorrectly, decorations were missing or misplaced, and signs and information was not readily available for guests. This lack of attention to detail lead to other minor mishaps that I felt affected the tone of the wedding. When any issue was brought up to Jackie, she appeared extremely defensive, coming up with excuses and transferring blame as opposed to just accepting fault, acknowledging issues and coming up with ideas to solve them. She never had a solution but only fire after fire that had to be put out by my wedding party and other vendors. Instead of being a calming presence, in my view and the view of our wedding party, she was reactive and created tension in the air. I offered to help her, minutes before the ceremony, and she snapped at me. I felt it was extremely unprofessional and inappropriate.