Venue Coordinator
Venue coordinators are employees of the venue itself. Their responsibilities are those pertaining to your experience with them, directly: show you venue, consulting your food and beverage choices, arranging menu tastings and processing the final invoice. On your wedding day, their focus is delivering their contracted services, and that’s it: ensuring the venue set up is accurate (tables, chairs and place setting only), the food is out on time and that tear down happens seamlessly. In addition, a Venue Coordinator may often departs once the meal is served.
Wedding Planner
A wedding planner is your personal consultant. Their focus is you and your vision of your dream wedding.
They are there from the start, including reviewing vendor contracts, vendor and venue recommendations, creating your timeline/itinerary, coordinating all the details with your vendors, and organizing your ceremony rehearsal.
On the wedding day they are there to oversee the schedule and make sure everything happens and happens on time. They are there to make sure your first dance starts on time, that your grandparents are present for your dance with your father, to make sure all of your vendors show up and know what they are expected to do, and to make sure all those perfect details you stressed over for the better part of a year are placed perfectly where you imagined them. They are also there to make sure that when something does go wrong that it is seamlessly corrected and you can enjoy your day without the knowledge that anything ever went wrong.
This also goes for “Day of Wedding Coordinators” personally hired by you. While they may come in closer to event day, they work exclusively for you!
The main difference is that a venue coordinator works for the venue, a wedding planner works for you.
Now don’t get me wrong, venue coordinators play a huge role in the wedding planning process. I love working with them and (I hope) they love working with me. However, it is important to realize what a venue coordinator’s role is so they know how much they can truly expect and not be frustrated and disappointed when they find that they are not able to do many of the things you need done.
