Here are some of the areas of performance that did not meet our expectations:
1)We alerted the DJ at our pre-wedding meeting that we had a choreographed dance and provided him with an exact stopping point. The DJ talked over the finale to our... dance.
2)During the father/daughter dance, I requested the DJ invite guests to join in on the dance halfway through; guests were never invited. Something we discussed at length during our pre-wedding meeting.
3)Songs were asked to stop being played due to length. Most songs were played in their entirety, when I was specifically told at the meeting that songs would flow together, never running all the way through.
4)I was given no alert to the bouquet toss and my bouquet was nowhere to be found. Instead of realizing no one was prepared, he continued to play the song the entire way through. When the bouquet was found the song was replayed again in its entirety.
5)There were certain songs to be played during dinner/cocktail hour only, and other songs dedicated for the reception. There were 64 total songs on the generated list. I was told 60 was a good number, as songs wouldn’t be played in full. Around 20 songs were played from our list. Many songs were played that weren’t on the list. I also had 3 songs that were on my MUST play list and only 1 was played. We spent a great deal of time crafting this list as it was important to us.
6)Songs were played twice, like “Man in the Mirror and the “Cha Cha Slide” was played twice in a row. In addition 3 Michael Jackson songs were played in a row.
7)There are multiple instances, on video, of my husband and I encouraging others on the dance floor when it was getting thin. Throughout the night we felt this 'burden,' and went out of our way to compensate. Multiple guests were aware of the subpar performance and were complaining.
Instead of offering an apology or validation when we first voiced our concerns, Crow chose to contact vendors involved in our wedding, even taking time to meet with some. Their response, after itemizing and attempting to disprove most of our concerns, was to offer a dinner to our favorite restaurant. Here was our response to their email:
You exerted a lot of time and effort into ‘proving’ the wedding was fun. We aren’t denying our guest had a pleasurable experience. The issue remains that we paid you to provide a service and were unhappy with the result. The fact that the majority of our guest and our wedding vendors we hire enjoyed themselves is irrelevant. The rain and my health had no impact on the services provided, and I am unclear as to why you mentioned that in your response. We feel that instead of validating our concerns, you instead tried to prove our concerns to be untrue. You can’t research an opinion. In our opinion, the performance didn’t live up to the high expectations we had for Crow.
We didn’t contact you with the expectation for any sort of reimbursement, money or otherwise. We were instead looking for validations of our concerns. The unexpected departure of our initially agreed upon DJ was a set, but we m maintained a solid belief that the replacement would fill his shoes admirably. This wasn’t the case, and instead of hearing our concerns, you became defensive, dissecting the affair, in what we view as an attempt to embarrass and belittle. It’s unfortunate that it has come to this, as the affair could have been rectified with an initial compassionate response, empathizing with our perspective.