I just need to vent and am not sure how to handle this situation. Last September, I hired a wedding planner (our wedding is 6-9-12). At first I had no intentions of hiring one, but I met her at a bridal show and she sold me on the idea of a DOC. At $600 it seemed worth it. I really liked her personality so we set up a meeting. She talked us into a much higher package, skipping right past a $1200 option to a $2400 which included vendor referrals and about 15 other items beyond just the DOC. I needed help conceptualizing my decor/floral/theme and figured she would make her money helping with that and with vendor referrals. Plus, at the time I really felt like we clicked.
Several weeks later she had never given me the list of her preferred vendors as promised so FI and I hit some more shows and found all of our own vendors except for paper and floral. No biggie. The coordinator told us to use her preferred floral vendor and raved about her. When we went to the flower shop, we were not impressed with the place or the girl representing it; but we had faith in our planner who said this vendor never let her down so we said we wanted samples and a quote.
Flash forward two months....still no samples, no quote. The planner blamed the holidays, then blamed personal issues in the floral vendors life. By the time we saw the two tiny pictures of the samples on my planner's phone (because she gave me one day notice that the flowers were in and we couldn't make it to the shop which is way out of our area on that much notice) we were so stressed about not having this just done already that we said to go ahead with the quote. Another week went by....and we get a quote that is 40% above the high end range of our budget! My planner knew what we wanted to spend and just sent the quote right over without even commenting on the high price.
At this point we were fed up and went with another florist on our own, without the planners help and had a wonderful experience, hiring the shop on the spot. Now I had to ask myself, what am I really paying this planner for?
I went over the list of all the items included in the $2400 package and found that we had done 85% of them ourselves. The planner never really told me what she planned to do or gave me much direction so anything I could handle doing, I just did myself. To her credit, she helped us pick linens at the vendors site which was quite a drive and also hooked us up with an awesome invitations person who did my complete invites suite by hand for less than $3 apiece and they are gorgeous.
So I emailed my planner, gave her all the reasons why I would like to downgrade our contract to the $1200 package (which still encompassed more service than we were really getting but I wanted to give her credit for the linens and paper help). She was not happy. She called me and tried to make a case for herself. One main point she mentioned was, "What about the unlimited phone conversations?" WHAT? You don't get unlimited phone conversations as an automatic when you hire someone, even for a simpler, cheaper DOC package? She also wanted credit for all the meetings/phone calls regarding the floral vendor but I had to question if she thought she really earned anything when that did not produce any service to us and only caused stress.
In the end, she said that she would accept the lower $1200 package if that would make us happy and asked me to put it down in an email with my expectations. I did, and the only thing I listed in the expectations beyond what she had done thus far were the DOC duties from the $600 package and showing up to my final planning meeting at the venue.
Almost a month later, she finally tells me that she won't go to the meeting because our contract states that she doesn't do third party meetings unless we go with the $2400 package. Yet, I combed over the contract and found nothing of the sort. You're going to be my DOC and you won't go to my venue final planning meeting? And I'm paying you $1200 of which you already have $1000??
So what do I do now: fire her, cut my losses, let her keep the $1000 deposit? Continue to try to work with her to get my money's worth?