Letting go of planner advice
My fiancé and I are looking for advice about parting ways with our planner. We got engaged in September 2025 and jumped straight into planning our 2027 wedding. We spoke with a few planners and locked one in that is very reputable in our MCOL city. She took a 50% deposit at signing with the balance due 10 days from the event. We only met with her once in 2025 virtually for an initial consult to see if we were a good match
Prior to hiring her, we had locked in a venue, and I had found a content creator, makeup artist and photographer. We simply had her review all three contracts to ensure they were legit before signing. She referred us to a DJ, and coordinated that contract being signed. Other than this, we haven’t booked any other vendors; we have never met in person, and we have done one video call so far this year. She has been very responsive and proactive, I have nothing negative to say about her, however we recently had an opportunity to pivot the plans of getting married locally and instead do a wedding abroad. I regret having jumped in so quickly to the planning process because I think ultimately we would have ended up making the decision to get married there, and I feel like I’ve wasted peoples time and money. If we finalize the Italy plans, we won’t need our local planner anymore, but we’ve have also given her a sizeable payment with very little services rendered. Her contract is clear that her deposit is non refundable, which I respect, however does anyone think there is a chance we could get a partial refund at this point? I know she offers a fixed consulting fee as well, perhaps she could charge us for the time she spent on emails/the one video call we did together?