I am wondering what to do and sort of at a loss about this. We booked a very popular vendor in part from her company's reviews on the knot, but mostly because weddingwire had ranked them so highly. I take knot reviews with a grain of salt because sometimes they can be fake, but I always thought that weddingwire's were completely accurate. This was for a DOC. Her company's price was at the very high end of the DOC's we looked at, but the reviews were just so fabulous that I really believed it was worth the extra money. She was fantastic until right up to the wedding, when the ball dropped. She was completely ineffective on the wedding day itself. We had a few major problems and she literally did nothing to correct them. She then failed to do several other things that she had promised to do. I won't get into the details here but they were really big things. We spoke with the owner of the company who quickly went from apologetic to very defensive. She eventually agreed to give us slightly more than 1/3 of our money back because of the DOC's actions (trust me - we deserved WAY more than this based on what went wrong). However, we were willing to settle and take this amount... the only problem was that she said that we had to sign a contract indicating that we would not say anything bad about the company on the knot or wedding wire. We couldn't even say anything that could be INTERPRETED as bad. It made me so angry because NO WONDER their reviews are so great! All the unhappy people are being paid to keep quiet. This absolutely goes against weddingwire's terms of service (not sure about the knot, but it probably does). Well, we didn't take the money because we refused to sign the contract. I think that is absolute BS. It's not fair that I got suckered into working with their really terrible company because of these reviews, and I didn't think I'd be any better than they are if I let them pay me to keep quiet. (The ironic thing is that I wouldn't have been so angry/upset about the situation if they had handled it correctly. I think the worst part of this BY A LONG SHOT is that they are being totally dishonest and are basically buying good reviews.. if they hadn't tried to shut me up, I wouldn't have been so vocal). I tried to contact weddingwire about how they are violating the terms of service. Weddingwire now will not write me back and won't say anything about it, even though it's a clear violation. This is probably because they get advertising money from this company. So.. what do I do at this point? I'm almost reluctant to give all of the bad information on the knot, because the people at this company have obviously shown that they are dishonest and unethical and they have personal information about me like my billing information etc. For all I know they could post everything on the internet. I can't leave an "anonymous" review because anyone with a brain can put two and two together. It just burns me up that they are still hooking people in with their fantastic reviews. Any company can have a bad day or have an employee who screws up, but it's all about how you deal with these problems. Trying to pay people to keep them quiet just really rubs me the WRONG way and is totally dishonest. What would you do?
Diagnosed with Stage IV Endo via Lap, 8/10
Started TTC, 11/10
Excision via Lap (60% of ovary removed), 5/11
IVF #1, 8/11 C/P
Surprise BFP, 9/6/11!
Betas, 179/307/1160
Heartbeat of 111, 9/26/11
Heartbeat of 176, 10/12/11
Confirmed GIRL!!!! 11/25/11