My fiancee booked Thistle last October for month-of coordination plus a couple add-on services including vendor sourcing for day-of staffing and rentals. The understanding we had is that the month-of services would not start until April, but vendor sourcing would need to happen early on. Thistle was incredibly responsive, helpful, and communicative right up until after they took our deposit, which they made absolutely sure to tell us was non-refundable. Quick note that according to their website, they no longer offer these add-on services, and yet they still refused to refund us for services we already paid for that they no longer provide. They also never told us themselves that they no longer provide the service we had paid for.
My fiancee reached out to them in November to try to check vendor sourcing off the list. She had a productive call with them in early November, going over the scope for staffing and rentals we needed, where they asked all the right questions and said they'd get back by the end of the week with info. My fiancee assured them that before Thanksgiving was perfectly fine, and followed up a couple days later (Nov. 9th) confirming some info she needed to provide. Then, crickets.
More than two months after my fiancee talked to them about rentals and staffing, we had not received anything concrete from them, just missed deadlines (that they set) and promises that they haven't forgotten about us, after multiple follow ups on our end. She told them we were concerned about follow-through on Jan 15. They respond immediately by email with:
A staffing company that would only have 2 staff for 14 hours (when we told them we needed 6 staff and only have the venue for 8 hours). It was concerning they thought 2 staff for a 160+ person event would be ok for a smooth event.
A list of links for various rentals, with no other information other than "A/V - link", "chairs - link" etc. No details, no quotes with the taxes and fees, no considerations about the vendors we might need to keep in mind, no "here are a couple options and the differences between them".
It felt like they panicked after my fiancee's last email to them saying we were concerned, and sent the first things they googled, because for all the rentals they shared, my fiancee found better options herself. The whole point of this add-on was to either take something off our plate, or help us find vendors we wouldn't have otherwise found ourselves through their experience in the industry. This led us to wonder what we were paying them for.
My fiancee met with them and gave them feedback about this, both on the quality of what we got and on the two months delay from when they originally said they'd get the info to us and all the follow-ups she needed to do to even get anything. They promised to redo the staffing research, and would get back to us the following week.
We were hesitant but really wanted it to work, and after they sent us some more detailed options for staffing, we hoped we were back on track, but my fiancee had responded with a couple of follow up questions about their recommended vendor, and after not hearing back again for nearly a week, we knew it was too many red flags and decided to terminate the contract. While a week is not totally unreasonable, it was right on the heels of a frank call about poor communication during the two months prior.
She sent them an email to terminate the contract, explain why, and ask for our deposit back minus the work they did for staffing research. They did the classic PR "we're so sorry you had that experience, and we want to find a way to make this work". They gaslit us by saying essentially that they were doing us a huge favor by communicating before our month-of services were supposed to start in April, even though we never expected them to do anything related to month-of early; the entire focus was on the vendor sourcing which NEEDS to happen well before a month prior to the wedding and is a separate service we paid for.
Another weird thing that started around this time was that whenever my fiancee emailed them she would always cc me, but whenever Thistle replied they would never reply to me, only to her. It's almost like they didn't want me seeing what a mess things were. Ultimately we felt that we couldn't trust them to coordinate our wedding so we terminated our contract, and we lost $790 from our deposit to them.
Thistle's very first Yelp review (which was posted after we'd already hired them), outlines many of the same issues that we had, so this is clearly a repeated pattern for them. All of the positive reviews seem to be ones that they requested from people after getting their first bad review. If we had seen the other bad review we never would have gone with them in the first place. Please also note that all of my other reviews on Yelp are positive; I'm not one to trash businesses just for the sake of it. Don't go with this company. read more