Castle wedding for 45 guests in Salzburg

Do NOT recommend for small traditional weddings Overall, I would not recommend using Peach Perfect for a small traditional wedding, especially one that would involve several vendors. We had a 45-person wedding a few weeks ago in Salzburg and worked with Vanessza over the past year to plan our event. Our planning experience with her felt like absolute chaos, especially in the couple of months leading up to our wedding, and a lot went wrong on our wedding day that was avoidable. It did not seem as though she had experience managing larger events, despite Peach Perfect’s advertising that they can manage events of up to 60 people, and I found many of our vendors and did a lot more of the planning myself than I expected. As I reflect back on our experience, I think the type of event we ultimately decided we wanted was a poor fit for this company. So much happened to make this a disappointing experience, but these are some issues we encountered that are representative examples: The company advertises “unlimited” planning meetings, but I found that we had to be more proactive in requesting meetings ourselves than I would have expected, especially as we got closer to the wedding date. I assumed they had a timeline of meetings they usually held with clients and kept waiting for Vanessza to schedule meetings with us closer to our wedding day, but this was not the case. This made planning chaotic. For the most part, everything was being planned over many very long emails, and details got lost along the way. When I asked for a meeting 6 weeks out from our wedding, Vanessza had a number of details confused. After that meeting, we did not have another meeting until our rehearsal the day before the wedding. In fact, Vanessza met with many of our vendors (e.g., photographer, videographer) in the couple of weeks before our wedding and did not offer to include us in the meetings nor did she ask about our preferences for the day (e.g., shot list) that would have been important to include before meeting with them. She seemed to try to avoid joining meetings with our decorator, which I would’ve thought she would’ve wanted to be a part of. I had to ask her to be present. Also, it felt like we were being asked to provide information on minor details very far in advance (e.g., order of ceremony songs) while more important items, such as setting a ceremony start time so that we could send out invitations, were neglected. It did not feel like Vanessza had an overall vision of our wedding in mind as she planned nor did she provide us with a clear sense of when we needed to decide what. She simply sourced vendors from the types of vendors we explicitly asked for. I kept waiting for her to ask us about things like planning a ceremony exit, getting signage, etc., but I was mistaken in thinking this was the level of service this company provides. They find and source vendors. Everything else is on you to figure out, and they are not going to proactively offer guidance on when you should be thinking about these things. There were many instances in which we wanted higher quality vendors than what would fit within the package they sold us. Vanessza was kind enough to coordinate with those individuals, but please note that they do not keep track of an overall budget or your payments for you if you book a vendor that does not fit in to their package. We were told on many occasions that it would be better to pay vendors directly to keep from paying VAT twice - to the vendor and to the planning company. While we appreciated not paying extra, it was never clear to me why this was not a concern with the local companies they found versus the local ones we found and suspect they likely add their own fee to the cost of each service in addition to their separate fee for planning services, which makes it very difficult to understand how you are allocating your budget and how much you are paying to Peach Perfect. Vanessza was not an advocate for us with our venue. Our venue ended up being very difficult to work with, and Vanessza deferred to us and our decorator to sort out the issues that arose. She also seemed to try to offload tasks onto our decorator or the venue event coordinator that did not seem to be their responsibility. For example, we wanted to plan a bubble exit, which I asked about around 6 weeks before the wedding. Vanessza asked the venue coordinator to locate a vendor for bubble machines (despite the fact the venue coordinator had been incredibly unhelpful thus far with our event). This of course did not pan out, I had to directly point out to Vanessza that this was not panning out, and she did not start looking until 2 weeks before our wedding. She, of course, said she could not find anything, and we ended up purchasing and flying bubble guns over with us. At the meeting that we had only 6 weeks out from our wedding, Vanessza informed us that she would have to leave early in our reception because she booked another wedding for the next day in a different country. We did not have a timeline set for our event yet, and she had even emailed us just a few days before this meeting telling us that she expected we would need to book more day-of coordination hours to cover our event. However, so much was still in the air that we hadn’t been able to calculate the number of hours we needed. After we pushed back, we were offered that another one of their staff would travel in to cover the remainder of our event. But they asked us to pay for this person’s travel and accommodations too, which we were already doing for Vanessza! After further push back, they then waived this request and we paid only for the number of hours of coverage we needed, but this unfolded over the weeks leading up to our wedding, which caused a great deal of unnecessary stress. The wedding day was chaotic and a lot went wrong, especially after Vanessza left. It felt like no one was giving me guidance on what I needed to have with me before the ceremony and when, and I kept being left in random rooms of our venue without any guidance as to what was next or where I needed to go. Even after the ceremony, I was still getting questions from Vanessza’s replacement about details that had been decided long ago. No one ensured that our wedding cake was served to all of our guests after it was cut and we went for pictures as we discussed, which we only discovered after the wedding was over so we wasted money on a cake. We talked about having the DJ introduce us into the party part of the evening and announce our first dance, as well as announce when transportation was leaving…yet no one ensured that they were set up with the audio equipment we had booked from the venue…so our announcements were just people trying to yell. We had to walk in and go up to the DJ and ask them to just start playing our first dance song which made for an awkward transition form dinner. I could go on… Weddings are expensive and important events that you want to have go well. Instead, I walked away with a lot of negative feelings about the experience and the day. Peach Perfect is not set up for small traditional weddings involving multiple vendors, and, while Vanessza is kind, our experience made it seem that she does not have the skillset to execute such an event.