Why do You Need to Hire a Wedding Planner A wedding planner can take your Pinterest inspiration into consideration and suggest budget-friendly ways to bring it to life

By Dipti Shah

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Traditionally, an Indian wedding is an exquisite blend of dramatic elements. It is an amalgamation of a dozen vendors, multiple contracts, a difficult payments schedule and amid all of this, it requires continuous monitoring, follow-ups and critical control.

This chaotic mix of plans, melodrama and rising demand for "hassle-free' and "experiential events' have spawned an organized cluster of event services aggregators, all under one roof, popularly known as Wedding Designing and Planning Companies.

Indian weddings seem to be getting bigger, fatter and luxurious than ever before. Professional planners residing over the design aspect of each event are now the key to the success of making these social celebrations a seamless experience for families. Besides, if you think a professional wedding planner is a privilege, here are six reasons for you to reconsider:

Professionals Value Your Time

Planning a wedding takes up a lot of your time. So much, that you can either focus on your business or do all the running around, planning, coordinating and following up with the dozen vendors rendering their commercial services to you for your big day. Besides, wedding checklists can run into pages, consume all your energy and leave you exhausted by the time your guests start to pour in and demand your attention. Hiring a professional wedding planner can save you time, energy as well as leave out to enjoy the festivities and cherish the memories for a lifetime.

You Need Professional Guidance To Make Your Vision A Reality

With the boom in digital information, opening up of a plethora of wedding inspiration boards and creative executions all over social media, you are bound to fall prey to the many exciting looking themes, ideas and concepts. By the time you finalise the venue, caterer and wedding invitations, you may already have a subconscious event draft ready in your mind about the colour schemes and musical entertainment you would like to have for reception. It can all get really confusing and add up to your costs, unless an experienced professional takes charge and makes unbiased and sound advice to you.

A wedding planner can take your Pinterest inspiration into consideration and suggest budget-friendly ways to bring it to life. You could be dreaming of having a well known Sufi singer performing for your reception, without really considering if there would be any audience for vocals that evening. Your wedding planner takes into consideration these minute details and visualise the entire evening to make it work for you.

Dealing With Emotions

Well, it is a well known fact; weddings in India can be emotionally stirring. As a weddings professional myself, I've witnessed brides not seeing eye-to-eye with their mothers and mothers-in-law. I can safely say we deal with not just a couple or their families, but with multiple emotions while planning the big day.

Each member of the family has their own expectations and hearing from a neutral person can help remove negative thoughts and persuade them to our point of view. It is not easy to deal with a plethora of conflicting opinions about how the wedding should unfold and it can be really hard to please everyone. Consider the problem solved as seasoned professionals deal with your family's expectations, layout the options at hand and may be relied upon to give you expert advice so you can make an informed decision.

Destination Weddings

If you are planning to host your wedding somewhere other than you live, you must consider the cons over the pros. It is not only hard to organise suppliers you've never met, you may also face challenges dealing with local authorities and seasoned commercial vendors. Experienced professional wedding planners always have a trick or two up their sleeve for getting the job done the way you want. Moreover, most of them have their select vendor affiliations who they work with on a regular basis and thus maintain quality.

Since many of us are full-time professional event planners, we indulge in networking and researching vendors and suppliers to build our network and to stay ahead of the trends almost on a regular basis.

With Practice Comes Perfection

Once aboard, a trustworthy wedding planner thinks first about you. Knowing who to trust and who is right for you is one of the hardest tasks of planning a wedding. The best thing to do is to have a weddings professional to join your team.

Now that you have onboard somebody well connected, well informed and always on the play field, you know you can get some sound sleep and not be taken for a ride. Of course, don't get carried away from labels and brands, for you will definitely have to bear the brunt of heavy price tags and over-busy schedules. Focus of getting the work done via efficient teams. Your weddings planner shall keep track of all your deadlines and drop in gentle reminders to ensure things are in place. When we have a client who is looking for a cinematic photographer, finding one does not take weeks of research and sending emails. It's one phone call.

Having had organised a couple of weddings, professional planners have quick solutions to problems that may seem huge to you. They have the right connections, can fetch you value deals, study contracts and make suggestions and ensure that every single element is planned well. Nothing will ever be missed and you will reap seamless benefits of good preparation, liaisoning and soliciting services.

Attention To Detail

A wedding planner is highly detail-oriented and swears by being organized. Your planner will think-through all events and what's needed to make them a success. Chances are, you've never planned an event of this magnitude. We've done this before so we work on tricky details you might otherwise overlook. I often tell my clients, we take care of the small things only to ensure the big things fall in place. Organisation is key!

Planning a wedding takes a lot of time, energy and focus. There's the endless research, details to remember, payments to make and scores of activities to be carried out, that aren't really fun but most necessary.

Professional services definitely come at a cost. However, my advice to most families and decision makers would be to be careful not to be penny wise and pound foolish. Having a wedding planner means you are in control. It's definitely your day, your way, but you have a specialist working on your behalf to do the legwork, reduce your stress levels and one who ensures every detail is your kind of perfect.

Dipti Shah

Founder, White Salt Entertainments

Dipti Shah is the Founder of White Salt Entertainments, extending experiential events services to clients, pan India. She has over 6 years of experience in luxury social celebrations, live shows and corporate events.

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