Kendra at simply grand had great style, knowledge of the areas, and thoughtful recommendations, but there were huge issues with professionalism.
She frequently canceled meetings at the last minute (literally after they started sometimes) afte...r we cleared our schedules. She failed to provide responses, made budget mistakes, provided quotes with errors with surprises coming up later for the same service, and was slow working with vendors. So much so that we had to go directly to vendors who sometimes told us they hadn't been able to reach her. When asked to make time for a short call at the end of days where she missed deadlines she agreed to get back to us by, she was extremely defensive that no meetings after 4pm were acceptable due to other events, even though she demanded flexibility from us and kept canceling workday meetings last minute. Plus she insisted to us she strictly limited her number of events to be a full service planner. She was slow to get back to emails and suddenly stopped answering phone calls during the last 2-3 months when things picked up. Finally, she flaked on a big ticket item and insisted on a particular vendor who dropped the ball, even though this forced a budget increase. The wedding was beautiful, but this planner went from polite and responsive to extremely unprofessional and downright rude and careless when it came to adjusting to post-covid realities as the event approached. She made the process a lot more work for us to hounds her than we expected.
For a full service planner with $5k+ retainer fee with 20% fee, this wasn't great service.
