If you’ve ever browsed through wedding blogs, I’m sure you’ll see plenty of them that say how stressful wedding planning can be.
But what really makes wedding planning stressful? It’s my opinion that wedding planning stress comes from the couple themselves and their family. Maybe it’s too much pressure to have this perfect wedding. Maybe it’s family dynamics that add to it.
One thing is clear. Not all weddings are stressful and not all couples have a nightmare weddings. Those are just the stories that get the most attention. Sort of like this one from a bride who left one hell of a review on LB Events & Promotions.
Note this wedding blogpost isn’t to air out dirty laundry, but more so to teach you how to handle situations
One dissatisfied bride who hired the wedding planning company left this wedding review:
The owners of the wedding planning company decided to reply back to the dissatisfied bride with this response:
Now that was a mouthful don’t you agree?
Here’s my response to Bride and Wedding Planner
My Feedback to the Dissatisfied Bride:
This is your wedding and emotions are high. One single thing can appear to be disastrous when you want your perfect day to be….perfect. When leaving a review, it’s better to give yourself time to process your entire wedding day. I recommend waiting a few weeks before you leave a review so that you can think of all the good and even bad points that could have been improved.
If you have a negative review, explain in detail how you felt. Verses saying something sucked, explain what could have been done better. The only thing I see in the bride’s review is that the bouquet toss was rushed. To me, that doesn’t really warrant such a bad review.
“Save yourself some stress”. What was stressful about the wedding planning service? That can help give other brides an idea of what you felt went wrong.
My feedback to the Wedding Planner:
Bottom line, the response was a nice nasty response that could have followed my advice to the bride. Give yourself time to get out of your feelings and understand that this is not about you.
Here you have a bride that is clearly upset. More than likely if what you explained happened, I can understand why you would be upset too. However, who is the professional in this situation? You are.
While it’s great that you conducted over 360 events, no one cares about those events. The dissatisfied bride cares about HER wedding. To lower your standards to call her “incompetent, discourteous, and evasive,” adds to the stress of the bride and her level of anger.
When trying to address a bad wedding review you should:
1. Apologize for the client feeling the way they feel
2. Try to explain why things happened the way they did in a professional way. Don’t just leave the review unanswered
3. Try to get on a phone call or discuss the details over email away from the public
4. Leave your feelings at the door
Outside of the rudeness and unprofessional response, one glaring issue that I see is the lack of the professional to have chosen their ideal couple. If you have gone through someone lying about payment, having an extremely short wedding reception and showing up late, you didn’t properly vet your client.
I will be the first to say not every couple that is getting married is a couple for me. Just like every DC Wedding Planner is not perfect for every couple getting married.
Your initial consultation should have raised red flags all over the place. When it comes to payment, we all know that couples need to have their invoices paid in full before the wedding day. You as the Wedding Planner should have made sure this happened. Why did you allow that to slide and then come back and leave a comment mentioning nonpayment?
I feel the wedding planning company did more harm to themselves than the three sentence review from a dissatisfied bride.