The only regret I have in my life, is hiring Jackie as my wedding planner. If you are considering hiring her, please read this. My goal here is to educate future brides so they can avoid the problems I encountered and hopefully save you some he...artache.
Based on my experiences with her, one could reasonably conclude that that as a wedding planner, she is disorganized, scatterbrained, careless and insensitive. Even in our meetings leading up to the wedding, she would have to ask me the same question multiple times, at multiple meetings. From what I saw, I felt that her notes were a mess and impossible to follow. Even after I typed out everything for her in extreme detail with lists of everything.
My fiance's mother had passed away, a few years before. I had told Jackie about it multiple times. It was a sensitive subject and I wanted it treated as such. Jackie forgot about her death, on multiple occasions. In meetings with my fiance and I, she asked about his mother, where does she live, what does she do, etc. When it got closer to the wedding, she asked when do we want his mom to come out during the ceremony, where do we want her to sit at the ceremony, etc. My poor fiance was confused and hurt. It was extremely awkward, needless to say. I felt that it was extremely insensitive and careless of Jackie to forget that my fiance's mother had passed away, and to make this error multiple times was astonishing to me.
- Jackie took it upon herself to move my mother to the earliest van on the wedding day without conferring with me, and then it was suggested as my idea, when it was not. My mom greeted me at the rehearsal dinner, in fury, because "I told Jackie to move her to the 7 AM van." It then became my burden to move my mom back to a later van and reorganize the schedule, again during the rehearsal dinner. This, to me, showed an insensitivity to family dynamics.
- Prior to the wedding, Jackie and I did a walk through of the entire wedding reception, ceremony, cocktail hour areas and discussed the placement and organization of tables, photo booth area, welcome signs, frames etc. Multiple areas were set up incorrectly, decorations were missing or misplaced, and signs and information was not readily available for guests. This lack of attention to detail lead to other minor mishaps that I felt affected the tone of the wedding.
There was no usher and this was a huge oversight on her part. She never brought it up or told me we needed one in all of the year of planning and on the day of, the wedding party came out to no seats, there was confusion and chaos during the ceremony.
When any issue was brought up to Jackie, she appeared extremely defensive, coming up with excuses and transferring blame as opposed to just accepting fault, acknowledging issues and coming up with ideas to solve them. She never had a solution but only fire after fire that had to be put out by my wedding party and other vendors. Instead of being a calming presence, in my view and the view of our wedding party, she was reactive and created tension in the air.
Minutes before the ceremony, I asked her if she needed help and she snapped at me. I felt this was extremely unprofessional to do.
I felt like we were on opposing teams and that Jackie had one agenda, which was very different than mine. I did not feel like she had my back in making decisions and we were not on the same page in terms of prioritizing what was important.