From a frugal (read: cheap) groom’s point of view, hiring a company to do what we could do ourselves seemed a hefty waste of money. In the internet age—even planning a destination wedding from halfway across the nation though we were—I couldn’t... see spending money on a wedding planner. In hindsight, I’m so glad we did. To those gentlemen who may be of the same opinion, ask yourself how much your bride’s sanity (and likely your own, by extension) is really worth. A wedding is stressful enough; ours much more than most due to other huge life changes. Thanks mostly to ATOB, our wedding day went off without a hitch, and more importantly, my bride was relaxed, stress-free and able to enjoy the day. That, to me, was priceless.
We hired ATOB about one year prior to our planned wedding date. Because we were living in the Southeastern US at the time, all our planning was to be done via Skype and through email. Our initial consultation convinced us that Kerri led a crack team of professionals, and convinced us that ATOB was the right choice. We were assigned a consultant, and after a few weeks, we were starting to get concerned when she was slow to respond to our requests. Before I could even voice my concerns, I received a phone call from Kerri that she had to let our consultant go because she wasn’t meeting the standards Kerri expected out of her planners. She reassigned Aimee to our wedding, and we were extremely pleased with the new level of service.
By the time Aimee took over, we had settled on our reception venue in Estes Park. She helped negotiate contracts, found vendors within our budget, and set us up with meetings once we determined that we would actually be able to make it to Colorado prior to the wedding date. She did all of this without ever meeting face-to-face, even when my bride had to be out of the country for several months.
Eventually we found out that we would be moving to the Pacific Northwest just one month prior to the wedding. As part of that move, we were actually on the road for over one month before we made it to our new home. With our limited access to the internet, Aimee and her assistant, Stephanie, were invaluable in the critical last few months prior to the wedding. They kept us up to date on what they were doing, and let us know when a decision had to be made. I can’t stress enough how important that was to us in the final two months before the wedding; we were extremely distracted and Aimee and Stephanie kept everything right on track.
Finally, the wedding day came and everything was perfect. My bride had a team of ATOB planners making sure she had everything she needed, and that everything went off without a hitch. Our families and guests kept complimenting us on how nice the wedding was, how nothing went wrong, and how beautiful it all was. And, as I said before, stress-free. We were able to simply enjoy ourselves.
A couple days after the wedding, we found out that there had been a miscommunication between Aimee and the cake server at our venue involving the difference between “serve” and “reserve.” When we asked her about it, Aimee immediately took care of the situation. She had the baker make another top tier and even shipped it all the way to us herself, since the baker doesn’t ship her wedding cakes.
My review has gone longer than I intended now. We definitely made the right decision in hiring ATOB, and if we had it all to do again, would not hesitate to hire them again.