What does a wedding planner charge?

Everything you need to know before hiring your wedding planner.

If you are just starting to organise your wedding, you have probably felt a certain vertigo when you see the list of tasks you have to manage in the coming months. Without many services to organise and as inexperienced in the sector, the best option is usually to hire a wedding planner. For this reason, many couples decide to leave their wedding in the hands of professionals and hire a wedding planner to help them organise their wedding from start to finish.

At Almudena Bulani we have been organising weddings since 2012, and we are well aware of the concerns of a couple who are faced with organising their wedding for the first time. The excitement and expectations are many, as well as the doubts and fears that arise around our professional activity, which is usually unknown to almost all couples who are starting to organise their wedding.

Many couples make the decision to hire a weding planner because of lack of time; other couples because they want to leave their wedding in the hands of professionals; and others because of distance and living in a different city from where they will celebrate their wedding. In many cases, a mixture of the three reasons above are what encourage many couples to enlist the help of a professional wedding designer and planner.

Once the decision has been made, the next step is to find the right professional and with this search, many questions arise: What services does a Wedding Planner offer? How can she help me? And the most common question: what does a wedding planner charge?

We answer the most common question before hiring the services of a wedding planner:

What do you charge for your services?

 

In this post, we are going to explain all the methods that a wedding planner has to charge for their services. And the reality in our country is that there is no single method, and that each Wedding Planner charges for their services in a different way. So take out paper and pencil and take note.

Work for Free:

You may laugh, but there are wedding planners who have chosen this as the basis of their business. And you may ask yourself, but what do they do for a living? Well, it's not for the love of art, they have other ways to earn their fees. And this is through the suppliers that the bride and groom finally hire.

In this type of management, the wedding planner offers her couples suppliers who offer her a commission for client intermediation. In other words, for each client that the wedding planner sends her, she receives a commission that can be fixed or variable. When it is a variable commission, it usually varies between 5% and 15% of the total. When it is fixed, it depends on the total amount.

As professional wedding planners, we advise you not to use this method of working with your future wedding planner and to be wary of any professional who sells you that they work for free. There are many reasons for this:

• Because you start your relationship with your wedding planner on a very negative basis: her work is priceless, but above all, it is worthless. Will you be able to make demands if you don't pay her?
• Because on this basis, your work of searching for and proposing suppliers will never be objective; it will always be conditioned and you will be offered the suppliers that will give you the highest commissions.
• The professionalism of the supplier, and whether they fit your style and budget, will no longer be important. Only how much you pay them will be important. They will not be objective about any shortcomings of the supplier.

Obviously, there are companies that work with this system, and they make large amounts of money while it works for them. But in our experience they don't manage to stay open for long. So if you hire a company that works with this format, there is no guarantee that they will continue to do so when your wedding date arrives.

Charge a percentage:

This is one of the most common methods of working in countries outside our borders. Especially in the USA and some European countries, this is the billing system used by most wedding planner companies.

In this system, the wedding planner charges a percentage (usually 10%) of the total budget. For example, for a wedding with a budget of €30,000, a wedding planner charging 10% would have a fee of €3,000.

In many cases, wedding planners who work with this system set a minimum fee, mainly to avoid being limited by smaller budgets for simpler weddings or weddings with fewer guests. In this case, the wedding planner would charge a 10% of the total with a minimum of "X amount". And each wedding planner sets his or her own minimum fee. 

Some disadvantages of this system are: 

In Spain it is difficult to understand this system, mainly due to a problem of trust, in which couples sometimes tend to think that the wedding planner will offer them more expensive suppliers to increase the cost of their wedding.

There is still not enough value given to our work to understand the link between: higher budget => more work and dedication => higher fees.

Fixed fee for each of the services:

This method of charging fees based on the type of service being provided (you can see in more detail general wedding planner services in the information on our full wedding service) is a fairly common system in our country. 

In this case, the wedding planner decides to price her fee based on the service she offers. In other words, the wedding planner service costs €1000, the complete organisation service costs €1500 etc. ....

With this system, other determining factors such as the number of guests or attendees or the complexity of the wedding itself are not taken into account. We opt for a "flat rate" system where there are no limitations and you pay a fixed price.

Charge based on the number of guests:

This system is based on the premise that the more guests, the greater the complexity. This is why some wedding planners organise their budgets based on the number of guests. 

The most common is that there are different categories, i.e. weddings with less than 50 guests, from 50 to 75 guests, etc... Often, a minimum budget is established, which would be the price that a couple would pay, for example, for an intimate wedding or an elopement.

Charge by the hour:

Although in other professional services this system of charging is quite common, in our work it is very difficult to measure the number of hours invested and to justify them in front of the partner.

For this reason, although it is a possible system, it is not at all common as a way of charging a wedding planner.

Make a personalised quotation:

This system is the most reasonable, but it has a small disadvantage, and that is that sometimes, as wedding planners, it is difficult for us to obtain the necessary information to be able to budget our work properly.

Sometimes basic information such as number of guests, date and type of wedding is not provided in a first contact; and this information is essential to be able to make this type of personalised quotes.

The reality is that due to the type of work we do, and the profile of our couples (who have little time to organise a wedding) the first contact is usually via email; an email that sometimes does not even include the basic details. 

Combined system:

This system can be a combination of some of the above. For example, a wedding planner who charges a more attractive fixed fee and combines it with commissions from suppliers. 

This system is quite common and its only premise is that the variable part of the commissions should never condition the work of the wedding planner. In other words, she should offer suppliers based on the couple's style and budget, never driven by mere financial remuneration. 

Another combined system could be to combine the system of charging per attendee based on the specific service contracted. In order to have a wider range of prices based on these variables.

There are also wedding planners who work with packaged systemsthat is, they have a basic pack, an intermediate pack and a premium pack. Each of them has a different price depending on the services included.

As you can see, there is a wide range of options that you can find when hiring your future wedding planner.

Our recommendation is that you always count on a serious and really professional company that charges for its professional service, whether in a pack, in a closed budget, by the type of service or the number of guests...

It is important that in addition to the price, you take into account their value: that you feel identified with their work, that you get on well with the person themselves, that they give you confidence and that there is a feeling.

Organising a wedding is a team effort, and you should feel confident and sure of your decision. Sometimes it is worth paying a little more, and choose the professional who transmits professionalism, closeness and security to organise your wedding.