Complaint Review: A Special Memory

We hired Weddings Las Vegas to plan our wedding at the Valley of Fire State Park.  Unknown to us, they contracted out our wedding to A Special Memory under the direction of Joshua Gust.  We did not know that this had happened until after we paid our money.

The wedding went off as planned.  It's what happened after that haunts us to this day.  A photographer was hired by Mr. Gust to take photographs of our wedding and video tape the ceremony.  The video was of the poorest quality.  We cannot hear parts of the ceremony because of the wind blowing across our microphones.  Have they not heard of devices to shield the wind?  As it turns out this poorly produced video is the only photographic memory we have of our wedding.

Weeks went by and we did not receive our CD.  We contacted Mr. Gust several times.  We were put off.  Excuses were given.  Finally, he admitted what had happened.  The photographer uploaded our photos to a server.  They did not use an online backup service or redundant server backups.  The only other backup of our wedding photos was on a CD.  A CD was sent to us which was poorly packaged in a flimsy mailer.  It arrived broken in half.  I asked for a replacement.  After more excuses, I was told that the CD that was sent to us was the back up CD.  The server crashed and our photos could not be retrieved.

Stupidly I sent the CD to Mr. Gust who promised to hire a data recovery company to try and retrieve our photos.  He said no photos could be retrieved.  He refused to give us the name and contact information for this company and any written proof that such a service had even been hired.  We demanded the CD be returned to us so we could hire someone to try to retrieve the photos.  That request has gone ignored.

Mr. Gust and Weddings Las Vegas refunded us the cost of our ceremony.  We are still out all of the travel and wardrobe expenses.  He offered to fly a photographer to our location to do a photo shoot.  This obviously would not be the same as our wedding photos.  Why would we trust that his choice of photographer would be any better the second time than it was the first?  We countered his offer and requested a reasonable monetary settlement so we could hire our own photographer to do a proper photo shoot when we renew our vows.  That counter offer has also gone ignored.  We have given Mr. Gust more than ample opportunity to make good on his offer and he has reneged by choosing to ignore us.

A Special Memory cheated us out of our special memory.