Month: July 2014

Other than the actual wedding day, brides and grooms planning a wedding at Disney probably most look forward to planning session day.

I’ve mentioned before that planning a Disney Wedding follows a unique schedule. Beginning at six months out from your wedding day, couples (and parents/family members if they are part of the planning process) schedule a planning session with their assigned wedding planner. These can either be held in person or over the phone if couples aren’t able to make the trip to Florida. This is the time when you can finally give voice to all those ideas you’ve pinned to your Pinterest board for your wedding day!

You can also schedule a separate menu tasting with the chefs that will be preparing the meal at your reception. I’ll discuss that in another post.

For now, I’ll tell you how our planning session went when we met with our planner a few weeks ago at Franck’s Bridal Studio.

Depending on the size of the wedding and number of events taking place, sessions last around 3-4 hours. During this time, our planner basically took us step-by-step through our wedding weekend beginning with rehearsal. We talked about where and what time we would prefer to hold rehearsal. They won’t guarantee a time and place until 30 days before so we had to give a couple of preferences.

Then we moved to the actual wedding day, starting from the time we wake up. This was important because we had to make sure that we had our photography set up for the right time to cover everything based on the hourly package that we picked. Since we are having an Epcot ceremony, our day will be starting very early.

We then made decisions on everything from transportation (if you want to use Cinderella’s coach for your wedding, now is your chance!) to song choices and favors and linens for the reception. Nothing is set in stone at this point. Essentially this is the “blue sky” phase of wedding planning. We were told to include everything we thought we might want. In the following weeks, our planner will prepare a Banquet Event Order (BEO) and then we can make cuts or adjustments from there, once we recover from the sticker shock! We had done a lot of research prior to our appointment so we had a very good idea of what we wanted. However, if you don’t, they have lots of displays and pictures to show different options. Basically anything you can think of – this is Disney after all!

The final thing we discussed during our meeting was the most fun – cake!! We could taste four different flavors of cake and four different fillings. We got a couple of bonuses because they included the buttercream icing and a slice of cake to show us how the layers would be. This was really fun and so hard to choose! I almost wish we were having a bigger wedding just so we could have more layers on our cake! In the end we chose marble cake with peanut butter cup filling for one layer, and almond cake with amaretto crunch filling for the other.

After cake, our floral designer came in to meet with us and discuss any flowers and décor we wanted for our wedding events. Lucky for us, our venues don’t need much extra decoration so that part was over pretty quickly. Plus, I came prepared with pictures and paint chips of our colors so that helped to make sure we were all on the same page.

Going into our meeting I was pretty anxious. I was worried that maybe we wouldn’t connect with our planner or that she would try to talk us into getting a bunch of extras that we didn’t want or need. I’m happy to report that everything went very smoothly and everyone was really helpful and kind. Our planner really took the time to make sure we came up with the best options. It was really fun to finally do some official planning! Throughout the day I kept think about how lucky we are to be there. It’s still a little surreal!

Now we just have to wait to get our BEO and hope we don’t need to make too many adjustments! Stay tuned for my report on our menu tasting, which was probably one of the most special experiences I’ve ever had.