Hi ladies! I didn’t really post anything on the board when I was planning my wedding, but I often read your posts and reviews and found everything so helpful. My husband and I recently got back from our honeymoon and I thought I’d post our vendor reviews – I hope they are as helpful to you as everything you ladies wrote was to me!
Venue and Caterer: Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza Since most of our guests were coming from out of town and we were not planning a church wedding, we decided that a hotel was the best type of venue for both the ceremony and reception (they also provide a room for the rehearsal). After looking into a number of hotels, we decided on the Holiday Inn at the Merchandise Mart, which is among the most affordable downtown hotels. It ended up being a great venue in every respect (the hotel also provided a substantial discounted rate for our guests). The hotel is nice and has incredible views of the city. Even though we used one of the smaller event rooms (our wedding had about 90 people), the space looked amazing (the hotel has a couple of large ballrooms for larger weddings). We were also pleasantly surprised with the quality of the food, which was quite good for hotel fare. The events manager, Barbara Martin, was extremely professional and was on top of everything.
Grade: A
Website: www.martplaza.com/">www.martplaza.com
Florist: Elegant Blooms We were very happy with our florist, Tracy Ciganek. We described our vision for the wedding during our initial meeting with her, and she executed that vision to perfection. All of the flowers and the centerpieces looked amazing. Tracy was also very easy to work with. She is based in Naperville, but she had no problem meeting with us in our neighborhood in Chicago. She was also great the day of the wedding – she was right on time and made sure that everyone got the appropriate flowers and helped with pinning corsages, etc.
Grade: A
Website: www.elegantblooms.net/">www.elegantblooms.net
Wedding Planner: Cori Ashford/Ashford Events After our wedding a number of our guests commented that everything seemed flawless. Cori is largely responsible for this. Since we envisioned a fairly simple wedding, we initially didn’t think that we would need any help. A couple of hours into our venue search we realized that we were wrong (that stuff is time consuming!). Having Cori in our corner not only saved us time and stress, but truly allowed us to fully enjoy our wedding day. Cori made everything easy for us: finding the venue, vendors, and planning the actual wedding itself. She helped keep us on schedule and organized throughout the entire process, and on the actual wedding day she was on hand to make sure everything went according to plan and to troubleshoot any problems that arose. Thanks to Cori we didn’t have to worry about anything. We can’t recommend her enough!
Grade: A+
Website: www.ashfordevents.com/">www.ashfordevents.com
Photographer: Bella Pictures/James Daley We chose Bella Pictures for our photography. It’s a large company that focuses on photo journalism and contracts with local photographers. Once you sign up, meet with a representative, and fill out online questionnaires about your preferences, they match you with a photographer to meet your style. The downside of dealing with this type of company is that we dealt with at least 6 different staff throughout the process-after meeting with the initial rep, every few months a new staff member would send an email and explain their role. I didn’t find it necessary to check in with all of them unless I had a specific question, but it didn’t matter that I never contacted them. If somebody had a lot of questions and constant concerns, I suppose that this could be helpful. Ultimately we were matched with James Daley, and he was great. He was easy to work with and truly captured the spirit of the day. The “best of the best” of our photos were posted online within 3 weeks of the wedding. By now we’ve already received all of our digital photos and we’re definitely pleased with everything. Being in downtown Chicago allowed us to use the skyline and scenery around the hotel area which turned out to be some of the best photos.
Grade- Bella Pictures: A-
Grade-James Daley: A
Websites: www.bellapictures.com/">www.bellapictures.com, www.daleyphoto.com/">www.daleyphoto.com
Invitations: Wedding Paper Divas We ordered our invitations online through Wedding Paper Divas. The selection, quality, and customer service was excellent. We would have also ordered programs, but our design was so simple that we decided to recreate something similar and make them ourselves. Still, I would recommend them for any paper needs or ideas- save the dates, invitations, programs, etc.
Grade: A
Website: www.weddingpaperdivas.com/">www.weddingpaperdivas.com
Hope this helps! Thanks again and good luck with your wedding planning!