Southern Elegance Events LLC

I recently was a bridesmaid in a wedding where Nikki was the wedding planner. Having gotten married in the Tampa Bay area in the past 2 years (with wonderful wedding planner that was not Nikki), I am familiar with a smooth running weddings. Unfortunately Nikki did not provide the same experience for my friend. She did not have a timeline for the wedding day, she had no solutions for fixing problems that came up throughout the day, she was "not available to be contacted" before 2pm the day of a 5pm wedding leaving the bride to field calls from vendors. She spend a majority of the after ceremony picture time complaining to groomsmen about her personal problems and was completely unprofessional. Definitely would not recommend her from this experience and looking through other reviews this does not seem to be an isolated issue.

In one sentence - your wedding will be easier without a wedding planner, if that wedding planner is Nikki Leonard. Nikki was the sole source of stress surrounding my wedding. We made the mistake of giving her multiple opportunities to prove herself, and she never once came through. She was unresponsive, 100% reactive, inaccurate, and overall frustrating to work with. As a wedding planner you really only have 2 jobs: i) pay attention to detail and make sure the little things all go right, and ii) make the bride feel at ease. Nikki took no time to read our contracts with other vendors and repeatedly sent over wildly inaccurate contracts. We then had to catch these mistakes and feed them back through her to the vendors for corrections. This was a lengthy process given her response time. Basically we were paying for the privilege of having her slow things down and mess things up. As far as making the bride feel at ease, my wife had to cut communication with Nikki 4 months prior to the wedding and run everything through the mother of the bride because dealing with Nikki's incompetence was too stressful. At no point did Nikki inspire the confidence that things would be done correctly, and at no point were they. If the bride can't deal with the wedding planner directly, you know there's a problem. And in this case, the problem was a professional lacking the two most important qualifications to perform their profession. I suppose shame on us for letting it go so far with her, but hopefully this review prevents you from making the same mistake!

BRIDES BEWARE. Working with Nikki was the worst experience I have ever had with a service provider. I don't like to write negative reviews considering that everybody has bad days and one experience may not be representative of their work on the whole. That said, I feel obligated to other brides to warn them of how truly miserable our experience was with Nikki so that they may avoid the stress and heartache we experienced. Nikki was unquestionably the most stressful aspect of our wedding, if not the sole source of stress. She was unresponsive from the start. It usually took 3 emails asking for a response before we received a reply. We hoped that perhaps as we got closer to the wedding we may become more of a priority, but she continued to be shockingly unresponsive. Progress on anything related to the wedding would not happen unless we reached out to her (multiple times) and asked for items to be taken care of. Nikki seemed to have zero respect for our time or interests. On the few occasions we got to speak with her, she would talk over us and interrupt, rambling off topic until we got off the phone. About 4 months before our wedding I could no longer work directly with Nikki because I was so frustrated by her misrepresentations and failure to put any effort into our wedding. As a result, my mother largely took over planning and would handle communications with Nikki. Nikki was upset and she felt that my mom was "stepping on her toes" (when really she was stepping in to pick up the slack Nikki had neglected) and yelled at her on the phone. To date, I am astounded a wedding planner or any professional would behave that way. My greatest frustration with Nikki was her complete lack of attention to detail and failure to review any of the contracts we received from vendors to check if they were correct. We would send a very clear list to Nikki of what we wanted from a specific vendor (i.e. 150 chairs for 150 guests) and she would send us a contract with glaring inaccuracies (i.e. a contract for 100 chairs for 150 guests). This happened with nearly every vendor. After several months of having to triple check every contract and tell Nikki all the corrections to be made (things she could have caught by simply checking the contracts against our past communications), we told her we thought we should terminate our relationship. It took us double the time to finalize contracts with vendors by working through Nikki and we would rather do it on our own even if it meant losing the money we already paid her. Nikki responded with a litany of excuses (personal problems, sickness, etc.) for which we truly felt bad for her and she promised to review contracts going forward as well as improve communication. Months went by and nothing improved. We again voiced our frustrations and she again responded with excuses regarding her personal life. She continued to do almost nothing for the wedding and mismanaged the reception in terms of timing, meals, and availability of resources we had paid for (i.e. no cutlery for the wedding cake, etc.). We found Nikki sitting down for most of the event. When we addressed our concerns with her behavior, she stormed out of the wedding - in the middle of the reception. We've since learned she told vendors we "fired" her which is why she left. This was not the case, however if I could change ANYTHING about our wedding we would have let Nikki go very early on as soon as we recognized how painful it is to work with her.

Nikki was the WORST!!! Save yourself the pain and DO NOT HIRE HER! I was the maid of honor at my sister's wedding and witnessed first hand the chaos she caused. She was so rude that the bride was terrified to even be near Nikki on the wedding day. There are lots of other wedding planners out there, don't use her!