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The Top 10 Questions to Ask a Wedding Planner

Your wedding celebration is the first chapter in your new life together, centered around you and your partner’s love and commitment to each other. If you’re considering adding a professional planner to your vendor team, it’s important that you vet them thoroughly to make sure they’re a good match for your personalities, as well as your wedding vision. To make the process easier, I’ve compiled a list of the top 10 questions to ask a wedding planner to help you through the process.

#1: Are you available on our date? Can you work within our budget?

These should be among the first questions you ask when you sit down to interview any potential planner. Ensuring that your potential planner is available and provides services you can afford are essential. Asking these questions up front will save all parties involved time and frustration down the road. If your wedding date is flexible, let the planner know that, too.

#2: What services do you provide?

Not all wedding planners are created equal. Some do more heavy lifting than others, partnering with you throughout the wedding preparation process, while others are really only there to make sure everything goes smoothly on the big day. I break down the different types of wedding planners in this post.

#3: How will we work together?

It’s important to know how many meetings you’ll have with your planner, and how they’ll keep you involved in the process. Some planners send detailed drafts to clients, while others create mood boards and sketches based on your input. Understand what sorts of collaboration will take place in person or by video chat, via phone, or over email. There’s no right way to communicate with your planner, so be sure their preferred method is also best for you.

#4: How many weddings have you planned?

Knowing how many weddings a potential planner has worked on gives you an idea of their experience. You can even ask if they’ve worked these past weddings as a lead planner, or assistant planner. Bonus question — ask how many weddings they serve each year. If a planner is working weddings every week, there’s a chance details are being overlooked.

#5: Have you worked at our venue before?

If your planner has served previous weddings at your venue, there’s a good chance they know most of the ins-and-outs of how things work at your location. While this is not an essential qualification for a planner, previous experience at your venue can save you time later on.

#6: What ideas can you contribute to our wedding vision?

This is another big one on our list of questions to ask a wedding planner — for two reasons. First, this gives the planner a chance to demonstrate that they’ve correctly grasped your vision for the big day. And perhaps even more importantly, they can show value and buy-in by contributing their creative spin on your ideas, which will help you determine if they’re a good fit for your wedding.

#7: Can you help us with other vendors?

Some wedding planners partner with clients to interview other vendors like photographers, caterers, DJs, bands, and more, and some are even willing to handle all of the contracts with other vendors, too. It’s also a good idea to check with your planer to see if they will handle vendor payments — can you provide the planner with a lump sum from which to cut checks to individual members of your team?

#8: What are your day-of wedding services like?

No matter what type of planner you decide to hire, you need to ask this question. Depending on the size and logistics of your wedding, your planner might bring a full team of assistants to the venue to make sure everything goes smoothly. You might also want to see if your planner has a designated backup person in case of sickness or emergency.

#9: What’s your plan for staying calm under pressure, or dealing with unexpected problems on the wedding day?

A well-thought-out backup plan, good organizational skills, and calm nerves are a good sign that your potential planner will be able to handle any situation on your wedding day.

#10: Do you carry liability insurance?

Of all the questions to ask a wedding planner, this might be the most important of all. Understand what sort of protection your planner brings to the table. Will your planner be covered if something goes wrong? What coverage will you receive based on the actions they take at the wedding?

Summary

With these questions to ask a wedding planner, you’ll be better prepared to partner with a powerful professional ally in preparation for one of the happiest celebrations of your life. It is my pleasure to collaborate with wedding planners to serve our couples as best as possible, and I’m happy to refer my couples to some of my favorite wedding planners located in Chicago, Milwaukee and beyond.