Andria Lewis Events

I would give zero stars if possible. It would take a week to write everything we experienced with Andria. As background to the below, we bought the largest package Andria offers. We ultimately paid her a retainer of $1,855, one $861.25 payment and one $871.25 installment for $3,587.50 total. After we hired her and started coordinating with caterers, bakers, party rental providers, florists, etc., we were told on multiple occasions to watch out for her as she can be unreliable and unprofessional. However, we stayed optimistic as our first impression of Andria was still positive.Our first hand experience with the unprofessional side of Andria occurred during an early meeting in the planning process. After a 20 minute walk to our agreed upon location, I waited for her another 20 minutes before then calling to confirm our appointment. It was at that time she notified me she would not make the appointment and forgot to inform me she was sick. Our expectation was the next time we saw her she would be apologetic of her oversight. Nope, didn't even acknowledge it had occurred. At this time, I began to get nervous and, as you can imagine, as a wedding planner the last thing you want to make a bride feel is nervous.Fast forward a couple months to about a year before the wedding. My now husband and I decided to change our plans and have a small wedding at our house instead. Since the revised plans would not require much advanced planning, we asked if she could instead help only on the day of the wedding. She said she would have to charge us at least another installment for this service. Given how much we had already paid her, we thought if we paid her anymore it would have been close to a full package price. So we told her no thanks let's go ahead and cancel everything. We agreed she would cancel everything for us, and she would return the full $2,700 deposit we paid for rentals, flowers, etc.If you need to get your hard earned deposit money back from Andria, good luck. Every imaginable excuse occurred as to why our $2,700 deposit could not be returned: Her PayPal is down. We asked her to mail it. Her assistant was supposed to have mailed it. My husband said he would drive to her office to pick-up a check. She's now out of town. After a few months of this back and forth, she began to not answer her phone and avoid us.After four months, we contacted a lawyer. They agreed it was time to send a letter. Before we spent money on legal counsel, I decided to go public with our issue and reach out to her via social media. I left comments on her various social media platforms asking her to get back with me regarding our deposit. After almost 5 months she finally returned our deposit. However, she had to return it in two installments as she did not have the full amount. What she spent our deposit money on, we don't know.It gets worse. A month before our small house wedding we get a call from one of the hotels we had originally blocked rooms with asking if we still needed our room block as no one had reserved rooms under our name. We notified the hotel we canceled that larger wedding a year ago and asked if Andria had notified them. Andria had not. Per the original contract with the hotel, we were now on the hook for the block of rooms given we were now less than 30 days away. This put under added stress during the weeks leading up to our wedding trying to fill a block of rooms we didn't need. We ultimately had to come out of pocket even more to cover this oversight by Andria.I wish I had done more research before hiring her. I wouldn't recommend her, terrible experience, close to a nightmare.