To get or not to get a professional wedding planner? That is a question!

January 12, 2019

Decoding the Pros and Cons of Hiring a Wedding Planner for Your Big Day

To get or not to get a professional wedding planner? That is a question!

Wedding planning is a quite a task!

Fireworks show, theme, candy bar or dance performance – these are wedding attractions for which more and more young couples decide to add to their wedding day. Thanks to a professional setting, your wedding can be unforgettable. But what will happen when we start saving on important details? Sometimes, as it happened to some of our brides, extreme meanness, can end up with a big wedding disaster.

“The ceremony is for the bride and groom, and the wedding reception for the guests”

This phrase falls more and more often from the lips of the brides. There is no doubt that the ceremony is a special moment. However, on this occasion, most newlyweds want to share their happiness with their loved ones and organize an unforgettable wedding party.

It feels like ordinary parties without additional attractions are already outdated. Young couples care about how to host their family and friends. Hence, the services of wedding consultants are popular in recent years.

The professional wedding planner – what they can help you with?

It will depend only on you how much responsibilities will you give to your wedding planner. A young couple, who decide to choose a path to hire professional usually can count on full coordination of the wedding.

The consultant work is to find suitable contractors but also worth remembering that the wedding planner is available to the brides all the time. If by any means, there is any problem that will arise during the wedding, he or she will deal with it! For the bride and groom, such help means enormous psychological comfort.

What’s more, the wedding planner will adjust to the wedding budget, and will even be careful not to cross it!

Many would think that such services are only for the rich. It’s a mistake! The average events prepared by wedding planners in the Chicago area last year were only $ 5,000. Remember that the wedding adviser’s honorarium is usually 20% of the whole wedding budget. For this amount, the consultant will negotiate many great discounts with wedding service providers!

Therefore, in the final analysis, the work of the wedding agent will not hurt your budget!

Couple reasons why hiring wedding planer is wise:

Wedding Consultant allows you to save time – it is by far the biggest benefit that comes from taking advantage of the wedding planner. Independent wedding organization is a huge challenge. Stress, haste, and mistakes are certainly not avoidable. Although most couples plan to marry about a year in advance, it really is not a lot of time. You have to choose a dress, a suit, make a list of guests, reserve a room, negotiate terms, choose a menu, plan sitting arrangements, remember decorations, a car, vanity case, orchestra, cake, hair & makeup. It is a big burden, which is really better to dump it all to the professional organizer hands who has already experienced that before.

Saving money:

As mentioned before, in the overall cost of a grand wedding, hiring a wedding planner, it is a small percentage of all expenses. What is the most important, a professional wedding planner will help you save a lot of money! How? Wedding consultants have contacts in the entire industry, so they can find a good room for a price that a person “on the street” will not get. They know where promotions are organized, they have much better rates at various sub-contractors (teams, DJs, alcohol suppliers, etc.). It’s a bit like building a house. If you have a good manager at your disposal, then it is going without any problems, and the specialist will negotiate the material prices more effectively.

You can focus on yourself:

The organization of the wedding accompanies a lot of things to do, including those that are not particularly pleasant. Imagine that on the day of the wedding you can not calmly put yourself in the hands of a beautician, because all the time you think about whether the hall is properly decorated, whether everything is buttoned up, etc. Poor vision, right? If you have a specialist, you can forget about it – you pay him for the luxury of peace.

Priceless advice:

Wedding consultant is a person with huge experience in the wedding industry, which probably organized dozens of celebrations. Therefore, they know which elements of the wedding are better forgiven, because, for example, guests always complain about them. In this industry, the theory does not have to go hand in hand with practice. Wedding planner tips prove to be invaluable and allow you to organize your dreamed wedding within the budget.

Guarantee:

If you organize a wedding yourself and something goes wrong, you will only have a grudge against yourself. Moreover, in the case of cooperation with a wedding planner, this responsibility falls on the shoulders of a specialist. You sign a contract with him, in which he undertakes to prepare the ceremony strictly according to your expectations and within the assumed budget. While he must worry about everything going perfectly. Believe me – every professional will stand up to let the Young Couple be satisfied.

Wedding Disasters – why it is not worth to be extremely economical planing the wedding. 

The average couple needs about 200 hours to organize the wedding on their own. A lot, right? Regardless of the size of the party, the list of matters related to the wedding is always long.  In the amok of pre-wedding preparations, it is easy to make hasty decisions.  Read a few of the situations we experienced with some of the couples in the past:

Couple Number 1: AWFUL FLOWERS

For Stacey (29 y.) and Brian (32 y.), couple from 2014, wedding decorations have been a secondary matter. The majority of florists for dressing the hall and the church asked over $2000.  That’s why the Stacy willingly agreed to the proposal of a friend who offered to perform a wedding decoration for $800. 

Stacy said:

”On the day of the wedding, my friend delivered my bouquets for me and the bridal party. Due to the lower cost, I chose a simple composition of roses. About 1.5 hours before the planned wedding, I was ready. The family, photographer, and videographer were waiting with me for the arrival of the groom. The first thing I remember when my finance arrives is my mother-in-law’s look at my wedding bouquet. It looked horrible. Roses were so stale that in several places you could see brown spots. The situation was saved by a maid of honor who fixed the rouses little and decorated it with a pale pink ribbon. The wedding bouquet was very modest, but at least it looked ok. Unfortunately, there was no time to change the decorations in the venue and in the church. I know, from my mother, that several people at the wedding commented on the poor church decorations. We were very sad. Especially I was worry how our pictures will look. I’m grateful we had an amazing photographer and she still delivered great photos. I thought that one thing will ruin it all.”

Couple number 2: DRUNK BARTENDER AND BROKEN AIR CONDITIONER. 

It was supposed to be perfect. Kathryn (33 y.) and John (35 y.), couple from 2016, seemed to be the ones who would look after their own wedding best. In retrospect, they both regret not having hired a wedding planner. In the course of preparations, it quickly came to light that even you try your best it is easy to miss a lot of details. Listen what Kathryn said about their wedding day:

“Our wedding is a series of smaller or larger hiccups. Where to start? Maybe from the broken air-conditioning? Imagine a hot day in July, guests squeezed like sardines in the wedding hall. After an hour, we were all wet. Under the influence of high temperature, the ladies dropped their hair and makeup. In the evening, most of the guests were cooling outside and the parquet was empty. Another huge mistake we did is to hire a colleague to be a bartender. The idea was great! Unfortunately, the friend did not meet the challenge and at 10 PM. he was unable to serve anyone. He was totally drunk. I was very stressed and if I could repeat that day I would never make the same mistakes. Make sure you actually have responsible people helping you otherwise you may end up like us. With a wedding which was far from my dreams.”

The above situations could have been avoided too. All you had to do was check the service providers better or entrust the wedding organization to a specialist.

Attractions for guests are an obligatory element of every wedding. It is often thanks to them that family and friends will remember “your big day” as the best they attended.

Let us know about your wedding experience with the comment bellow.

We encourage you to follow us on Instagram or Facebook or check our Wedding Tips for Couples on our site where you will receive a lot of great inspiration every day.

P.S. Don’t forget to join our amazing Wedding Planning Community on Facebook!

Check out our latest posts:

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  1. Kelly says:

    Great advice about hiring a wedding planner

  2. Amy says:

    Yikes!! Those stories are good reason to hire a wedding planner rather than take on the task yourself. Time is money, and if you think you’re saving money by not hiring one you could be very wrong for the amount of research and time it takes to plan your whole wedding.

  3. Katerina says:

    These are great insights for couples planning weddings!

  4. Adrienne says:

    Such a great article on hiring weddings planners for your big day!

  5. You have pointed out the most common question regarding to wedding planning. for which numerous people are hunting for. Your way out is presented in awesome and easy to understand manner. Keep helping people by sharing nice posts. Thanks.

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Chicago + Suburbs + Illinois + Wisconsin

Est. 2013 | © 2023 Bozena Voytko Photography  |  Chicago + Suburbs + Illinois + Wisconsin

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