Big Sur Weddings By Elegant Events

I typically don't write reviews but I felt I had to given the severity of the poor experience we had with Diane. Our wedding recently passed (Sept 10 2022) and Diane completely ghosted us before the wedding without any kind of explanation. To this day, we haven't heard from her. She took our money and disappeared. To provide context, we hired Diane in November 2021 for our September 2022 wedding. We hired her for month-of coordination, but she doesn't have specific packages, so we also agreed to some minor wedding planning items in the months leading up to the wedding as well. I am pretty organized and had planned to do 99% of the planning alone, but since we were planning a destination wedding in Big Sur, I wanted to have Diane gut-check some items, especially because she knew our venue (Glen Oaks) so well. In the beginning, Diane would communicate sparingly - maybe once every 2-3 weeks, which I initially thought was fine because our wedding wasn't for a year and she had other more time-sensitive things to attend to. We paid a $500 deposit and then in March 2022, we received a bill for $756 (less our deposit, $216) that was not itemized at all. It literally said "Itinerary, vision boards, timelines". Apparently this amounted to 14 hours worth of work, but we never received the vision boards and to this day I have no idea what that means. We paid the invoice, and never heard from Diane again. In July, Diane posted to her Instagram that her mother had passed and she would be taking a break, but didn't indicate how long. Wanting to be sensitive, we did not reach out to her about wedding planning items. 2.5 weeks went by and we received an email from an assistant (which we never knew she had), and the assistant let us know she would be helping with wedding planning items in Diane's place but that Diane fully intended to be there for our wedding. Great! We responded immediately with our condolences and questions, the biggest being securing rentals since Diane told us explicitly that we needed to go through her to get them, and we were starting to cut it close being only 1.5 months out. The assistant didn't respond, and after 11 days we followed up. After 6 days of no response, we sent another email; again, no response. By that point, we were 30 days out from our wedding and started to look for a new coordinator since we not getting any response. We learned from our other vendors that Diane also had food poisoning at one point, but had been working weddings regularly again as early as August 6th, which means she ignored our calls and emails willfully and deliberately. To this day, she has not acknowledged that she completely ghosted us without a single word. Please stay away from Diane and her extremely unprofessional business; the amount of stress she put us through literally made me sick before the wedding. While I understand that Diane went through some hardships, that is no excuse to take your client's money and never respond to them ever again. Seriously, what kind of person does that?