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FAQ

Photo courtesy of Isle + Oak Photography

Frequently Asked Questions

Curious about us? Want to know what does a coordinator actually does? Don’t know how we can help? Find some of our most frequently asked questions below!
DOC or Day of Coordination is an outdated term as we are with you so much longer than just a day! More commonly our services are being referred to as Month of Coordination or Wedding Management, OR if you look at our packages, Penny Lane or A Day in the Life. These packages start as early as 6 weeks before your wedding where we gather all the information that you’ve planned for your wedding and process it all into one amazing timeline and we begin to coordinate your vendors. We are there to solve your problems (a lot of the time without you even knowing there is a problem!), lead your rehearsal, and keep you on time on your wedding day.

DIY is such a large spectrum of weddings! It can be as simple as the fact that you’re planning the full wedding, or as complex as you’re designing your flowers, making your own cake, and decorating your venue. We love working with creatives who aspire to get hands on and sometimes even dirty to make their wedding truly theirs.

The question really should be “Why don’t I need ThistleBEA at my wedding?” because we take care of so much for you! We make your timeline, find missed details you need to take care of, solve problems that you may not even notice, handle vendors,ensuring that people show up and do the work they’re contracted to do, bringing you snacks while you take photos, bustling dresses and tying bowties, wrangling stray wedding attendants, and so much more. If you take a gander at our testimonials page, some of our couples get into detail about the crazy extents we go to to make a wedding a success.

To count the number of weddings we do we would have to have a counter on here and we are not as html savvy as we like to think we are. We have coordinated well over a hundred weddings at this point and have had our hands in dozens more foir set-up, tear-down, staffing, and more. 

Our annual number can fluctuate a little and our personal lives and responsibilities tend to help dictate how many weddings we decide to take on. Usually we don’t exceed two weddings for the entire team each week (one lead planner for each) but in the past we have done as many as 5 weddings in one weekend (again, with different leads; no lead will ever have two weddings in one day, nor will they have two weddings one day after another). In the future, as our team continues to grow, we will be taking on even more!

This answer varies depending on the time of year you’re getting married and the popularity of the weekend. Are you getting married on August 8th, 2008 (we can’t time travel, so we can’t do that wedding anyway)? You’re going to want to book us 18 months in advance. A more realistic example is a long weekend; if you’re choosing a BC stat holiday weekend, it’s likely that you’re going to want to book your coordinator a year out. If you’re having your wedding on a seemingly random weekend in November, you’re likely fine to wait until June to book. It’s all about how many more weddings are likely to happen on your wedding day. By default, we suggest booking your coordinator for a May-September wedding year out and you coordinator for an October-April wedding 6-9 months out.

The thing about averages are they are so hard to work with when you’re looking at such a wide spectrum of events. A lavish wedding in the downtown core is likely to cost 10x a low key wedding in your church hall, but averages will find you in the middle of that. On average, we find that our couples spend between $10,000 and $25,000 for their weddings, but we have worked with couples with budgets as low as $7,000.

Do I have a handy dandy tool for you!! The map below has zones within the Lower Mainland and the prices we charge for travel fees for your wedding. Now, if you have multiple locations (ceremony in one spot, reception in another) a travel fee may need to be applied to your wedding, and you’ll notice a whole lot of space where no travel fee is indicated (like to the gulf islands or up to Squamish) and that’s because we will have to custom quote you a travel fee and in some cases, ferry and accommodation fees. None of our travel fees include parking and you’ll find in areas where we can’t escape paid parking (downtown core, UBC, etc.) we will have to tack on parking expenses to your bill.

 

In short, no. In long, sometimes. For your basic stat holidays we do not add on an additional fee however weddings are a first booked basis (see the next question). The exceptions to this rule are Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve weddings. The extra fees for these weddings are calculated on a case by case basis and are used as incentives to have our planners and assistants give up these special holidays (and the day following) with their families to make your wedding a success.
We do not hold any wedding dates for couples without a paid 50% retainer and a contract; however, we do give people first right of refusal depending on when they inquired. When we send out our contract and invoice, the couple has 5 days to retain our services for their wedding date before we free up the date and offer it to the next person. Unfortunately we have to do this because as good as someone’s intentions may be, we occasionally get people who assure us that they intend to book then fail to do so after we have already turned away another perspective couple.

In the prices you see on the packages page of our website, no. We do charge GST which will be reflected on the invoice you receive from us.

No. No no no. We do not make money off of you. Instead, if we refer you to one of our favourite vendors who may feel the urge to offer us a kickback to say thank-you, we instead ask to pass that savings onto our couple. Our job is to make your wedding as easy as possible and sometimes securing you discounts does this. Now, we can’t promise all vendors we refer to you will do this, but when it happens it’s a wonderful surprise.

You’ll see photos all over our website of beautiful happy couples and these are our real life couples, not just some randos that we found on Google and they are photos that their amazing photographers have kindly shared with us with the permission of the couple. While we hope to use your professional photos, that decision is up to your photographer, as they retain copyright to your images. We will use photos that we take of your decor and other aspects that we handle ourselves, and if you’re comfortable with us using the images of you and your beautiful new spouse, you best bet that we are bragging about you and your wedding where we can. If you are more private people, we are happy to avoid using images with your faces in them, and will even use just your initials when we refer to your wedding.

We will be as of 2023!! Sonaiya (one of our lead coordinators) is parterning her full planning business with ThistleBEA to offer full planning package options! When you inquire, please be sure to indicate that you’re interested in full planning. 

Friendors, if you’re unsure, are friends who may be professionals or hobbyists that can offer you services for your wedding in lieu of you hiring someone you don’t know. And we are extremely happy to work with these people! If your friend has offered to make your cake and this is something you’re comfortable with, we are excited that your friends have offered this help to you and that you’ve got this personal touch added to your wedding (not to mention the possible savings!).

This is a newer policy that’s been added to our contract but something we’ve always done; no matter who is obtaining our services, paying or signing, our loyalty starts with the couple. The wedding day should be and is all about the couple (you) first, and that’s where our priority lies.

We assign the lead coordinator for each wedding about 3 months prior to your wedding date. Sometimes at booking we can assure you of who your planner will be and if you have a preference for a planner, please let us know! No matter what though, you will get to spend quality time with Breanne (our founder and principal coordinator) while she works with your lead coordinator to create your timeline.

While we’re happy to offer our Hello, Goodbye package to all sorts of events, weddings are our passion so our regular coordination services only apply to weddings.

In the unlikely event (and we do mean unlikely) that your lead planner isn’t able to attend your wedding, ThistleBEA is built of a team of planners and all of your details are handled on cloud based systems which means that any one of our awesome planners can have access to your wedding details in a moment’s notice.

There is a HUGE difference between a venue coordinator and a wedding coordinator. When you hire a wedding coordinator you are ensuring that you have someone on your team who’s priority is you. A venue coordinator’s job is to take care of the venue’s interests first and foremost. It’s also unlikely that a venue coordinator will take care of organizing your other outside vendors like a photographer, videographer, dj, or hair and make-up artists. If you are doubting if you need ThistleBEA on your team, be sure to ask your venue coordinator if they help with vendors not associated with the venue.

There’s a reason that a venue would require you to have a “day of coordinator”. You might think that you have everything covered but they have seen time and time again the value added when a coordinator takes over a wedding. Our job as wedding coordinators is to make your life easier and the wedding day seamless. If you hire us because your venue requires it, our job does not change and we will still do the same quality and quantity of work. If you feel like you have everything covered and are just hiring us to satisfy your venue’s requirements, take a look at our Penny Lane package, it’s still our coordination service, but it has a time limit on it and satisfies most venues’ requirements.
We start our hiring process in January to prepare for our next wedding season. If you’d like to join our team, please e-mail your resume to weddings@thistlebea.com between December and March.

Maybe! Check out our Careers page to see any current job openings or sign up for notifications when we open up our applications again!

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