My fiance and I are getting married in October. We both work full time and knew we'd need help planning our queer wedding. We had hoped that having HCTP as our planners would help us tremendously but unfortunately this was not the case.
We felt like we were always 3 steps ahead of Chris and that we had the additional burden of managing her instead of the other way around. We were literally up in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to get her to perform for us.
We felt like our wedding was not a priority to HCTP as Chris has other jobs. She had told us at our first meeting that she would be out of town at times but assured us that she would be readily available by phone and email which she was not.
A friend of mine is also getting married and has a wedding planner. I had a side by side comparison of what a planner can and should be doing for you. My friend's planner's fee was exactly the same, but they were getting much more attention and service -- for example, they were getting introduced to catereers, tastings were setup for them, and they were getting vendor recommendations based on their preferences and style. We only received a few names for photographers and DJs and the lists seemed sparse and as if the had not been fully vetted. Granted the vendors were all lesbians according to Chris, which was a plus, but a) we had minimal information about the quality of their service/product, and b) we felt we could have Googled lists (or Yelped :) that would have been just as helpful. There was NO added benefit.
We had hoped hiring a wedding planner would alleviate at least some or our anxiety, but in one example, our stress was even elevated for no good reason. We had picked out the hotel, her only job was to get us a block of rooms. She send us an anxious email stating the hotel was running out of available rooms, she was dashing out of town and asking us to call them to get it sorted. Instead of handling this situation and shielding us from additional stress, she sent us an urgent email telling us we 'd better call them right away! Panicked by this email my partner called immediately and handled the situation, which turned out to be a communication error more than anything. Way to service your client folks!
Being Queer we wanted to support them. We decided to give them the benefit of the doubt with a final call to action listing the things we needed done. Unfortunately in the return email she could not admit to the problems, and worse, was defensive. That was the final straw and we decided to bite the financial bullet and let HCTP go with only 4 months until our big day. To their credit, in the end, they admitted they were overbooked and could not properly attend to our wedding planning and refunded a small amount of our deposit.
Though we didn't want to write this review, we felt people should not go through what we did without fair warning. What we would do differently would be to ask exactly how many gay weddings they had performed, if they have worked directly with vendors and not be so excited and try not to make an emotional decision (yay, a lesbian wedding planner) but instead put more practical thought into selecting a planner who had the experience, time and style/personality match that would work best with us. Ultimately, we wish the best for HCTP in their growing business and hope they can use this feedback to make adjustments. read more