Aisle Planner was our primary wedding planning tool for our wedding. It was chosen for us by our wedding planner, Jordan Xu of Emily Jordan Events, who I highly recommend by the way: https://www.yelp.com/biz/emily-jordan-events-atlanta. The main things we used Aisle Planner for were for our guest list, budget, reception layout and seating, and schedule/timeline.
For our guest list, we were able to keep and maintain a list of our guests and both their physical mailing and email addresses for years. Years because our wedding planning process started in 2018 and our wedding, which was originally scheduled for 2020, was delayed two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to put our guests into groups and prioritize them into A, B, and C lists. I know - nothing an Excel spreadsheet can't do. I did like how Aisle Planner cleanly exported guest list data into Excel. It's nice to have all of our friends and families' information all in one place now.
Since we had to postpone our wedding for two years, we had to collect addresses again. For that process, our planner suggested we use Paperless Post: https://www.yelp.com/biz/paperless-post-new-york. We used Paperless Post to send our last Save the Dates (we actually sent out *three* different Save the Dates for three different wedding dates - one each in 2020, 2021, and 2022). After collecting the latest addresses for all of our guests via Paperless Post, our planner transferred them into Aisle Planner.
We hosted our website, maintained our gift registry and links to other registries, and collected RSVPs with Zola: https://www.yelp.com/biz/zola-new-york. Thank goodness we had our planner because she helped us keep track of all these different wedding platforms and services. Our planner used Aisle Planner to send a mass email to all of our guests to let them know that our originally-scheduled wedding date in May 2020 had been postponed to May 2021. We used both Minted and Paperless Post, as mentioned above, to notify our guests via physical mail and email, respectively, about our second wedding postponement from May 2021 to April 2022.
If you're keeping track, that means we also had to get our guests' mailing addresses into Minted: https://www.yelp.com/biz/minted-san-francisco-8. I mention all this to say that Aisle Planner wasn't a complete all-in-one wedding planning solution for us. The whole process was more disjointed than I expected, but that's from my limited perspective as the groom. My wife had more input into the decision-making along with our planner who, as a seasoned professional that we put our full trust into, was the real expert. Just tell me where to sign and who to pay.
I also have to mention that both our photographer, Leigh Wolfe Photography, and videographer, WedFlix, used HoneyBook. HoneyBook was yet another platform we had to keep up with during our wedding planning process for communications, document/file exchange, and payments with those specific vendors.
Aisle Planner's dashboard let us easily see our percent completion in the planning process, guest RSVP summary, budget, and payments due.
One of my favorite parts of the wedding planning process was doing the table assignments. We did this in Aisle Planner. First, our planner did the layout / floor plan for the reception. Then I went in and dragged and dropped all 138 guests to their tables. Aisle Planner wasn't the most intuitive or user-friendly in doing the table assignments, but it functioned well enough. I was able to quickly come up with table assignments that my wife and I were happy with.
Our planner developed and maintained our very important schedule/timeline in Aisle Planner. It included timelines both for the day of the wedding and the day before the wedding (for the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner). The timeline was printed to PDF and shared with our close family and wedding party along with being distributed by our planner to key people (vendors) at our final walkthrough at the venue. Our planner had also printed out the reception layout and distributed it at the final walkthrough. I could tell our contact at the venue was impressed at the preparation. It was all thanks to our planner's hard work with the help of, of course, Aisle Planner. read more