3 1/2 years ago Carmen Hocking was our wedding planner. The reason I'm only now writing the review is I've had difficulties reliving negative experiences inflicted by Carmen. I write this to help give me some closure since there was no closure given on her end & to help save anyone from going through what we went through. I don't have enough room to explain everything that happened so I'll do my best to give you an idea.
We got married outside of her radius so the first thing we wanted to figure out was if we decided to go with her, what the additional cost would look like. She decided to give us a deal to help us decide to go with her. And later on when she actually started traveling to the venue we were made aware that gas mileage outside of her radius, according to the contract, was worded much differently than she intended. Even after she admitted fault with the inconsistency she still made sure we paid it so really we never got a deal.
As we continued making payments to her, her attitude in her emails started to change. She became very condescending & we felt extremely disrespected.
According to her contract I was entitled to as much conversation with her as I wanted yet she kept trying to charge me extra for talking about certain topics that were already included.
Our friend officiated the wedding & she was aware of the need for her to coordinate the rehearsal & ceremony which she agreed to. For whatever reason the day of the rehearsal she suddenly was unaware of this so instead it became a cluster. She just kept saying it wasn't her job since she wasn't officiating. It got to the point where I had to jump in & try to use what little time we had left to clue our wedding party in to what we wanted the next day. We hardly got anything accomplished which then resulted in the ceremony being really unorganized. Because our wedding party was basically making it up as they went along our grandparents ended up sitting down when they got no instruction prior to the ceremony causing them to not even participate so we didn't get them in the video.
These are some of the big instances that happened during the process, but there were more. And unfortunately it didn't stop there. She affected us during our honeymoon & for about six months after the wedding through our social media & our parent's.
I should have stood up to her better when I tried to & stood up to her more often. An even better solution would have been to cut ties & move on, but I was not strong enough at the time to stick up for us when she was wrong. I also got nervous about the money we had already paid to her. And when we finally confronted her about every instance she never responded & we have not heard from her since. Hindsight is 20/20, but we wish we never would have gone with her. read more