Are You Coordinator Friendly?

I'm just throwing this out there (and it's early reasearch for a project coming up next year): if you are a wedding ceremony or reception facility (anywhere), do you consider yourself "coordinator friendly"?  What qualities do you have that make you coordinator friendly?

Please comment - I'm really interested in starting a dialogue about this.  A good percentage of our readership is made up of wedding coordinators nationwide.  I'd like to pose more questions that lead to a better understanding of what venues and coordinators can do to work more effectively together and ethically support each other's services.

For engaged couples, I'm hoping that ultimately exposure to properties where coordinators and venue staff work cooperatively to produce the highest quality wedding event experiences will help you make your choices more easily.  Certainly the best potential for a great wedding is found where the industry's top professionals are working together with a common goal: your wedding day bliss.

Comment, comment, comment.

Happy Planning!

Shayna

Comments

[Jenny]

The idea of a wedding planner is amazing. Someone to take care of all the details and be your friend and confidant during a very stressful time. Pick up all the loose ends and make the "most important" day of your life a lovely memorable experience.

As a caterer, this person can make our experience trying to give you a wonderful day a joy or an absolute nightmare.

The road that brings people to the profession of catering has many different paths and comes from many different disciplines. We pride ourselves in gaining experience, learning from the past and suggesting things that we have found actually work.

As many paths that caterers take, the journey to being an experienced wedding planner is even more winding. Many of them start as enthusiastic brides who loved planning their own wedding. Some are caterers who really enjoy helping the bride and groom with more than just the reception itself and branched out from there. Just like people, all planners are not created equally.

As a planner, your first a foremost thought should be keeping all the well laid plans on track and keeping communication between all the vendors. I have worked with handfuls of very knowledgeable and organized people who have made my evening run well and are a joy to work with. I have also worked with planners who have no business even attending a wedding let alone offering advise to anyone in a big white dress.

I've had coordinators ask me to mail them information on my facility for their info binder for brides to review for perspective sites. I was happy to oblige and even went a step further to invite her to plan a visit to our location. I thought it would be a great idea for to see the space and get to know us for just a few moments. She very rudely refused and said she didn't need to see it and just wanted a brochure. I was a little put off by her claiming to be a professional event planner and she would even suggest a location that she had never worked with before let alone laid eyes on. I thought this was the point of a planner, experience with location or vendor?

During one fall wedding while we were serving the head table, the planner insisted that she be feed a meal immediately. I was shocked at her demand in the middle of the ballroom as the bride and groom had not been feed yet and they saw her fit. We promised that we would feed her, the band, the photographer as soon as the guests were feed. This was S.O.P., agreed on prior to and seemed logical to me. She didn't see the importance of not stopping our staff from feeding guests to feed the vendors, which were going to get feed and feed well in just a few minutes. What shocked me about this was she made the wedding all about her, not the bride and groom. By the way, her shoes were off at this point because her feet hurt.

Many planners are not as experienced in the guest psyche as a caterer may be. We have a general idea of how a group will act 85% of the time and the different factors that effect outcomes of situations. Things like what people like to eat, how much they will drink, how weather effects them, how travel time and locations of certain items really change their perception of planning and convenience. Caterers develop a sixth sense about these things and we are pro-active in planning according to the info we gather from our meetings. We spending hours setting up for these events and see how the guests react to our choices during the whole event. We see at the end what is left over, where glassware is left, what bar placement worked well for the flow of the party, we have to throw away dozens of unwanted favors that guests leave behind, we see what was successful and what wasn't. Planners, take our advise, we’ll show you all the tulle and ribbon we throw away every Saturday night. We want everything to look just as good as you do, but we also need to make sure everything is safe, comfortable and in the right quantities to accommodate your size group.

We go into the planning process open minded when there is a coordinator involved. We want the bride and groom to have a great day just like you do. It's when the planner has no experienced or feels threatened, it makes our work much more difficult. Please be honest with the bride about the number and type of wedding you have planned

I guess every line of work has people who are just starting out, I just hope that they don't sell themselves to brides experienced and would really be open minded when it comes to keeping an open dialogue with all the vendors including the caterer.