It has been almost a year since my wedding, arranged by Irie Matrimony. I wanted to wait a while to let things simmer before writing out a review.
I would describe this company as disorganized and generally shady. I chose Irie Matrimony becaus...e of the good reviews (in retrospect I suspect that many of these are not written by actual customers) and because I had hoped that having a wedding planner would make things easier and stress-free. I wish that I could say that Irie Matrimony accomplished this, but it was the opposite.
I’ll start with the pros:
* Any wedding will be beautiful in the Virgin Islands. The location is truly what made up for all of the stress that the sisters who own Irie Matrimony caused.
* The food at the vendor we chose (Sunset Grille), the DJ, the officiant and the steel pan drummer that we had at the wedding were all wonderful and professional.
* The wedding arch, centerpieces and flowers were all beautiful and well done. Though I will say that the arch was missing a component that we agreed on via the portal that Irie Matrimony uses.
Cons:
* Throughout the planning process there seemed to be a lot of confusion. They would send an email asking me a question (I.e. “which of these photographers would you like?”) and I would answer it (I.e. “Blue Glass Photography”) and then several weeks later they would ask again as though I had never responded in the first place. This happened numerous times with a number of different situations.
* They forgot to include one of the girls in my bridal party (there were only 3) in the invoice so we were short one bouquet for the wedding and had to scramble to put something together last minute. I can take ownership that I should have double checked the invoice, but they were told many, many times how many girls were in my bridal party and missed it anyway.
* The photographer (Blue Glass Photography) was AWFUL. I don’t know how much this had to do with Blue Glass and how much was due to poor coordination from Irie Matrimony. The photographer that arrived for the wedding was not who I paid for, but was instead his “apprentice”. I was told that the actual photographer would arrive later but he never showed. The apprentice photographer did not seem to have any idea what to do, seemed confused about what his job was, and gave us no direction at all for photographs.
* The space we had agreed to for the reception was changed the day before the wedding. I had paid $700 for “cafe lighting” but that wasn’t doable in the new space. I was told I would be refunded. Irie Matrimony put up some Christmas lights around the entrance and insisted that this was a $1000 item and only refunded me $200.
* The day before the wedding they told me that the wedding would be held half an hour earlier than they had originally told me. This means that the time on the invitations would have had my guests arriving 30 minutes late to the wedding. This left me scrambling to make sure everyone knew and added a lot of stress.
* Our seating arrangements were completely wrong for the reception.
* The wedding planner was actively high throughout the wedding itself. Several of my guests mentioned seeing her using in the parking lot. I wouldn’t actually care so much about this except for how poorly everything was handled. So it was insult to injury.
* We literally had to start the process of walking down the aisle all over again because they were so disorganized.