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SAYING “I do” to a wedding planner can be the second most important vow a newly engaged couple makes.
With people marrying later, more women working and weddings growing ever splashier, many couples are hiring planners to help sort through the dizzying choices concerning the location, invitations, flowers, photographers, color schemes, D.J.’s, bands, lighting, place cards, centerpieces, cakes and fog machines, to name a dozen.
But as the wedding planning field expands, some couples are finding that planners, like a broken engagement, can cause heartache.
David Mandel of Los Angeles, an executive producer of the HBO program “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and his bride, Dr. Rebecca Whitney, hired and dismissed two consultants because they were “planzillas.”
“It was like we had this mutual enemy — our wedding planner,” Mr. Mandel recalled. “We were not sleeping well. It was beyond miserable.”
The first, who Mr. Mandel said was “very well known in Los Angeles,” dropped out of sight for a month after the first meeting with the couple. The second tried to steer them to a hotel in Palm Springs with which she frequently did business.
The proposed wedding approached $1 million, “hundreds of thousands of dollars more than we originally thought,” Mr. Mandel said. “She was getting 20 percent of whatever our wedding was going to cost, so she was negotiating in her best interest, not ours.”
Finally, Mr. Mandel and his bride, a pediatrician, found a third planner they liked. They were happily wed last New Year’s Eve in New York, at Cipriani 42nd Street.
The couple’s experience was not all that rare, as even some wedding planners acknowledge.
“I’ve been doing this my whole life, long enough to know that some of us in this business are a little full of ourselves,” said Marcy Blum, a New York planner who got in on the ground floor of the field in 1986, when the number of planners nationwide was fewer than a thousand.
“In fact,” she said, “a lot of wedding planners are entering the field with no training, so buyer beware.”
The average cost of a wedding is now $27,852, Condé Nast Bridal Media says. Typically, the planner — there are about 10,000 in the United States, according to Gerard J. Monaghan, a founder of the Association of Bridal Consultants — receives about 20 percent of the total. Others charge a flat fee, from several hundred dollars to as much as $100,000.
Selecting a planner, or as they often prefer to be called, a wedding coordinator, can be tricky, especially if just what she or he can bring to the banquet table is not spelled out.
“A couple should sit down with a planner before hiring that person and ask a lot of questions,” said Leslie Price, an owner of In Any Event in New York. “Both sides need to fully understand each other’s expectations.”
Many couples use planners because they want to avoid the headache of directing an event that can quickly metamorphose into something along the lines of a major awards show.
Jacqueline C. Gordon, a homemaker in Derwood, Md., grew tired of the “checking and re-checking” of “every little thing” when her first daughter married. So, for her second daughter’s wedding, she hired a planner, and, as a result, she said, “I basically showed up.”
But the experience of Jennifer Rudin and Glen Pearson was far different. “We just didn’t connect with our planner on any level,” said the bride, the director of casting and talent development at Disney Theatrical Productions in New York.
The couple, who were married in September 2005 at the Ritz-Carlton, Huntington Hotel and Spa in Pasadena, Calif., said the hotel required a planner, and recommended one. The couple say they sat with her in a bar at the hotel and flicked through photos of other people’s weddings, while she pitched themes (Hawaiian? Italian?), colored margaritas and her brother, the fantastic wedding photographer.
“It was always about her,” Ms. Rudin Pearson said, “never about us.” In the end they dropped that planner and chose one of their own.
Jill Hilts, the director of catering sales at the Ritz, said that she “is not aware of anybody who has ever had a complaint” about a planner on its recommended list. She said that the Ritz is vast, with 23 acres of gardens where weddings take place, and therefore, she said: “It is not possible for one individual to properly service a wedding here. It takes a team of professionals to assist one of our coordinators.”
Wedding experts say that planners are playing an increasingly large role in the marital-industrial complex.
“The idea of wedding planning has really existed for over 100 years,” said Maria McBride, the wedding style director for Brides magazine. “Affluent families always hired a social director to plan all of their affairs.
“We saw the wedding planner trend emerge again in the 1980s when the stock market and economy were soaring. By 1992, the wedding planner had exploded into its own niche business.”
Wedding planners say that their clients are vulnerable. They are often starry-eyed, eager to impress, young and clueless about the business.
That is why, industry experts say, couples need to enlist the help of planners who work for a flat fee and excel in negotiating contracts with event spaces of the couple’s own choosing. Antonia van der Meer, the editor in chief of Modern Bride magazine, said, “Good planners should pay for themselves.”
Laura Chavis, a planner in New York, said she deals with the managers of 50 wedding sites across the metropolitan area, including castles, lofts, bars and country clubs.
She passes all discounts to her clients, she said, and never accepts a finder’s fee. But not all planners work like that. Mr. Monaghan of the consultants association, a trade group with 3,800 members (up from one in 1981) based in New Milford, Conn., said his organization ejected a woman a few years ago for taking kickbacks from a limousine driver. “That’s a no-no,” he said.
One wedding trend is enlisting the help of a “day-of”’ planner, www.WedNDay.com which costs much less than a full-scale coordinator, usually a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The couple makes all the arrangements and then deputizes the planner to run everything on the actual wedding day, like checking traffic reports, alphabetizing escort cards and making sure the band doesn’t play “Louie, Louie,” or at least not too loudly.
BUSINESSES like Wedding One are another option. It is a one-stop wedding shop that opened in Flushing, Queens, 12 years ago, mostly serving Korean-American couples. Wedding One has a dress shop, beauty salon, floral studio, photo studio and consultants who can book D.J.’s, videographers and just about anything else. Branches now operate in SoHo, Fort Lee, N.J., and Los Angeles.
“My needs were pretty simple and everything was in one place,” said Dina Lim, a child psychiatrist in San Diego who married with the help of Wedding One in June 2005 in Central Park. “I didn’t want to complicate things with a planner.” Neither did David Mandel. “Weddings are a stressful enough time,” he said. “So my advice to people getting married is to find a planner who wants to put together your wedding, not theirs.”
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