Hi everyone! I'm still here :)

Sorry I've been a bad blogger... I'm still here and still in love with weddings and planning. First of all... happy new year! :) Hope you are all still keeping your new year resolutions. I'm still trying to keep mine by trying a new restaurant every week while cooking more at home. So far so good!

I wanted to share a wedding tip with you that I've learned since I had planned my own wedding. This has to do with wedding vendors (such as myself). Many of you spend many hours on the internet researching to find the perfect vendor that matches your personality, needs, budgets and everything and anything you can think of. One of the most popular thing is to use those wedding websites where vendors post information and are reviewed by brides (like Project Wedding... which I'm on!). Do you ever wonder how accurate the reviews are and how much does this affect your decision?

If a vendor has perfect ratings, it's always a good idea to meet them and asks lots of questions before deciding. And if you forget to ask something, don't worry and contact the potential vendors again! One of the key things that I noticed the most when I was contacting them was their response time. It's understandable that not everyone is email connected 24-7 but when responses require many days, that could raise a warning. You don't want to stress about waiting for responses as the wedding day approaches near and there may be more and more questions and last minute decisions that needs to be communicated to them. There are so many details to think about already... I'm sure you wouldn't want to worry about some more (Did you hear that stress isn't good for the skin? :)

Another thing is when vendors are really busy and their business is 'too good' that it's hard to ever connect with them as a person. While emails are great, a phone call and face to face meeting can never be replaced. Even though everything will eventually fall in place, I would never want the couples that I worked with have any regrets because I didn't have enough time to spend with them to understand all their needs. It's our job to help and provide guidance to the couples. Spending time with the couple before the wedding is actually one of my favorite part of the job because I love hearing about their ideas/vision and helping them execute them.

Reviews are another thing that I feel is a bit gray. With the internet these days, people are free to post their views but not all vendors are gracious when something negative is said about them. In fact (and I'm being very honest here since it happened to me), there have been vendors that have suppressed negative reviews by threatening to sue the reviewers. There have been other vendors who continuously change their business name so bad reviews can never be linked back to them.

I didn't want this post to be so negative but I did want to provide some warnings to future brides/grooms out there! There are lots of great vendors out there and really love what they do. It's the few out there that could really put a damper on the planning.

Let me know how things go... would love to hear from you! ;)