Complaint Review: Katherine's Event Planning

  My fiance and I are to be married in Bar Harbor, Maine on Sept 20th of this year. Because we were from out of town we thought it would be a good idea to hire a planner to help assit us with hotel arrangements for our guests, ceremony locations, reception locations and so on.

  We found Katherine on a Bar Harbor Website called Acadia Magic.com a few months back and inititated our realtionship via email. At first she seemed very enthusiastic to assist us promising that she has a lot of fun things in store for us. Katherine had sent us a email that included the different services she provided. We settled on her Plan B($625.00) which would have us invloved with a portion of the planning and Katherine would assist with the rest and would include going over contracts to make sure we were paying fair value and not go over budget.

  Most of the conversations were through email which personally frusturated me as I would much rather have these conversations on the phone. Katherine helped us with hotel suggestions for our guests, she offered ideas for wedding locations. She insisted that we get a location for the wedding first before she would help us with photographers, Dj's etc....

We agreed on a location for our wedding which was a place called Sands Beach, that location required a permit so we explained that we have two dogs which were included in our ceremony and we would have apporximately 40 guests. Now, this was metnioned to her when she was hired back in April or so. Katherine understood this and contacted the parks department who told her that the dogs would be allowed on the beach as long as they were leashed and a permit would be required for guests over 10 persons. We sent out our invites with the understand that this would be our wedding ceremony location clearly stated along with our gift registry on the wedding invites.

As the time progressed we were doing our own research(Katherine wasn't giving us the information needed so we basically started taking over our planning) and set up a Reception location, we found our own DJ and person who would creat a cake for us, hired our own photographer. Katherine had very little input on these tasks and her emails were becoming more random as time went on. we asked Katherine for a Beauty Salon suggestion and she responded with "oh, try this place" and that was it, didn't seem to know anyone in particular there and no further follow up. As far as looking over contracts, that was non existent only to say that the Dj price seems good.

  Katherine had mentioned in early August that she would be away on vacation and would reach out to us when she came back. She never did reach out to us and at that point I was growing tired of her lack of interest and my only thought was firing her and finsih the jobs ourselves.

  About two weeks ago, we found out that we were not allowed to have the Dogs on the beach and that the maximum amount of persons for the reception could not go over 30. So, basically her one true task we needed her to do for us blew up in our faces. Although we later found out that since it was off season we could have the Dogs on the beach but the guest limit remained true.

  My fiance And I tried calling her number and it only rang without going to voicemail, forgot to mention the fact that she did not give us a cell phone #. We called several times and nothing. Our Emails went unanswered, I reached out to the person who was to matty us and she said, that she would reach out to KAtherine. I even contacted the proprietor of the Acadiamagic.com site who also said, he would reach out to her.

  In my email we talked about our disappointment with her services, feeling that she did not obligate her contract and how could she screw up the ceremony location information knowing this information was on our Wedding invites? A week went by and still no response which prompted me to send another email basically questioning her ethics, and giving her 48 hours to respond or else she is fired and we would consider legal actions.

Two days ago Katherine did respond by saying, Lilo and Joe( my name is Jon you would think as a supposed professional she should get her clients names correct)  I have been a wedding planner for 10 plus years I wish you the best on your upcoming wedding, absolutely no response regarding the ceremony location blunder. I sent a final email basically attacking her business sense, thanking her for causing more stress for my fiance, so on and so forth.

  I have all the email and contract information if needed.