The truth is that all the staff at Porto Weddings are incredibly lucky to work in the business of making our clients dreams come true, but when we get new wedding planners coming to work for us, often the first thing we have to do is give them a cold bath in the reality of what it is that wedding planners actually do! I suppose there is a sort of Hollywood mythology about the impossibly glamorous world that wedding planners inhabit, but the truth is that 80% of the work of a wedding planner is a good deal more mundane than Hollywood might have you believe!
So how do we spend most of our days in wedding planning? Well we spend it in the engine room of a wedding where you find the catering contracts, the hourly rates for coach hire after midnight on a Saturday, working out where the sound engineer is going to stay for the night and if he would possibly mind sharing a room with the lighting guy? In short it is not very glamorous and there are a lot of moving parts in a destination wedding none of which can possibly go wrong and RUIN THE BIG DAY! So, your fabulous dream wedding on the fairytale vineyard in the hills around Porto all comes down to a big spreadsheet and our wedding planners all have to learn to become slaves to the spreadsheet – funny how they never show that part in the movies……
But once a day the excel files are closed and all of us emerge from the Porto Weddings office to convene the Creative Thinking Department aka the morning coffee break. Generally, the most hilarious part of the day when we can discuss the more bizarre requests that we have had from our brides and grooms and just how the hell are we going to manage that in rural northern Portugal? We never like to say ‘no’ to our clients and that really means we have to get creative sometimes and push our vendors to the limit of their capabilities. Our clients come from literally all-round the globe and of course not only does every culture have its particular wedding traditions, but some brides and grooms are quite ‘eccentric’. Here at Porto Weddings we really love ‘eccentric’ because it is what really gets the creative juices and laughter flowing at the Creative Thinking Department meetings.
So don’t feel sorry for us wedding planners – we all work incredibly hard and assiduously to make your dreams come true, but we all laugh a lot and love the fact that each wedding is more bonkers than the next one. It is what keeps us on our toes! So don’t be shy tell us about your secret wish list for your dream wedding and who knows perhaps the Creative Thinking Department will find the perfect solution.
