It pains me to write a negative review about someone’s business, but a year later I am still thinking about my experience with Marrero Events, who I hired as a month-of coordinator, and feel it’s appropriate to share. On a positive note, I will say that Paula was very helpful when it came to giving advice, answering questions, and acting as a sounding board. She always responded quickly, helped me make fast decisions, and got a lot of things done. However, there were a lot of negative things that outweighed the positive. Here are just some of the more frustrating experiences we had:
1) She said that she should definitely be present for my tasting at the venue and even confirmed she would be there a few days before. But the day of, someone else was there whom I had never been introduced to who said Paula got "held up". There was zero follow-up after, from either of them. When I told Paula I was upset, she told me she usually has other planners that handle month-of clients and that she normally doesn't attend tastings so if she came it would have been a favor. I found this all to be contradictory, not communicated well, and frankly unprofessional, but stuck with her because she promised to take the lead on my wedding going forward.
2) A few days before our wedding she said she would no longer be able to attend our rehearsal due to another event, again saying that she typically doesn't do them and it would have been a favor. Up until then, she spoke as if she would be there and had said I was her only client that weekend. She also said that without our officiant there she wouldn’t be much help anyway. Seriously?! She attempted to cancel the rehearsal altogether saying we didn’t really need one anyway since it’s more for the parents to feel comfortable, but I pushed and in the end we did end up having a short rehearsal with the venue’s event coordinator. Not only was it clear that we really did need one, but it would have been very helpful to have Paula there. This was very upsetting to have happen days before our wedding from someone we were depending on to guide us.
3) Then there was the actual wedding day. I am not naïve to think nothing would go wrong, but it was very chaotic and many things happened incorrectly that I don’t think should have with a wedding coordinator. One thing that really frustrated me was that no one received any type of schedule for the wedding day (as advertised), so the wedding party was extremely confused throughout the day and night. Another frustrating thing was that she makes a big deal of taking care of all the bills and tips for you on the wedding day so you don’t have to worry about money, but she lost the payment for our band, and I didn’t find out until 2 weeks later when they emailed me on my honeymoon. More generally, there were just a lot of things not where they were supposed to be when they were needed, valuable items that didn’t get returned to me, and many things specifically asked for that were not done.
So while there were some positives, there were just so many errors, mix-ups, contradictions, etc. in addition to the examples above that led me to be very disappointed with my experience with her. I felt there was a general lack of organization, follow-through, attention to detail, and communication (things you would expect in spades from a wedding coordinator/planner), and I unfortunately would not recommend using Marrero Events for your big day.