gao18

We entered into a wedding planning contract with Camille in February and began planning in early March. We  decided to fire Camille in mid August due to her unresponsiveness. We wish we had not selected her originally as a planner as she has disappointed us many times. Our last call/meeting with Camille was May 3rd. We have a client portal and our records state that the last modification she made to our file was  April 19th when she added possible videographers for us. We feel that Camille took advantage of us the last three months. She was aware that my fiancé Matt was available to plan with her but she would sometimes go 1-2 weeks with no response to his texts. It was exhausting that we had to follow up with her continuously, asking her to respond to our messag. Camille was not transparent about the months we would book vendors in our wedding day timeline and did not adjust our wedding timeline nor notify us. We had to take a lot of initiative in planning, I started contacting caterers and makeup artists myself because she was unresponsive. A job the wedding planner is supposed to do. We regret hiring Camille, because we feel that she is very inflexible, unenthusiastic, and has added too much stress to our wedding planning process. Wedding planning is supposed to be a happy and exciting process but she took this away from us. 

Camille sent us a message once in April that we were wasting her time by making her tour a venue we were interested in. For a different venue we had arranged with her to do a live video chat to see the venue and woke up earlier than we normally do because of the time zone difference. We suspected she was late to her tour because she called us over an hour after our meeting time. The worst thing that day was that she told us her phone was uncharged for our live video tour and her phone was about to die. My fiancé had to ask the coordinator of the tour for her to use her phone to show us the venue. We found this to be very unprofessional especially because this was the one tour we did through live video chat. Because Camille was late it was not possible for us to see every room in the venue as planned and the tour was very rushed. We found it very unprofessional for a wedding planner to have their phone uncharged right before an important tour.

We selected a venue in April and I had told Camille we learned of the miscommunication that was had between them about their flexibility and ability to work with us. We asked for the future for Camille to include us in emails so Camille is forced to communicate messages correctly and clearly from the venues. After that Camille texted us over WhatsApp a lengthy message which seemed to suggest she was frustrated at us. She complained that her wedding planning fee was low and listed all the work she has done for us, suggesting we were ungrateful. We felt from that moment she was talking down to us and had no respect for us as clients. Camille had chosen the price of her wedding planning services, so we were surprised that she was unappreciative of the amount we had paid her. We then called Camille later that April to express how we felt about her lengthy text and tell her we were disappointed in her. Camille told me that I was aggressive in the meeting. I told her that because I am black that this is a very bad word to call someone who is a black woman in America. We had thought everything had been resolved after meeting with her but Camille proceeded after the meeting to block both my access and  my fiance's Matt's access to our wedding planning portal online. This is in violation of our contract and we notified her of that the same day. Me and my fiance contacted Camille twice to regain access to the portal. Camille denied doing this but this is not a mere coincidence that both I and my fiancé Matt  lost access to our client portals with her the same day of our meeting with her. Again we find this to be very unprofessional behavior. 

These past three months my fiance and I have had to take a lot of initiative researching vendors and barely received any guidance from Camille in the next steps of our wedding planning process. She has made us feel like a burden to her and this is not a nice feeling. For example, we had to reach out to her many times for her to review the contract for our photographer. Additionally, because of delayed responses from one videographer we were interested in; we asked Camille to move forward with catering. Camille refused saying that she only does one vendor at a time. We found this to be inflexible because why would we have to select a videographer before we select the caterer of our wedding? I also sent Camille several messages to fix the save the date I had designed so we could send it out later in June, after we had signed the contract with the venue in June, she never sent us a save the date design and it is now Aug. 

In the middle of July me and my fiance requested a meeting  with Camille for August 1st. Camille told us she can meet only August 8th or 9th we agreed to meet with her then even though we were on vacation  and had to adjust our schedules, again because of the time zone. We sent Camille several texts to confirm the meeting time on August 8th. The day of august 8th was when Camille responded to tell us that there would be no meeting as she was busy with another wedding. Camille did not apologize for canceling the meeting she just said she was busy and could not meet until August 17th or 18th. She said we had a lot of time to plan things. We felt she had no time for us because for that period of four weeks mid July to mid August, Camille did not do anything to plan for our wedding and delayed our wedding process. I communicated to Camille how unprofessional I thought it was to cancel a meeting the same day as the planned meeting especially since our last call/meeting with Camille was on May 3rd. Camille then promised to add catering information the week of august 9th. Camille never uploaded catering information so we had no choice but to fire her on August 17th. We think it is very unfair for anyone to be treated this way, especially a client planning a destination wedding from America. We are disappointed in Camille's lack of communication, transparency, and inflexibility. We wish we had fired her sooner in April and are very disappointed in the time and money we lost in the process.

Please note that I have verified my statements with Zank you and have added this review.