Speaking with the Wedding Consultant

This morning I was at work, standing and chatting with a coworker about our experience at PAX when I felt the old, familiar buzzing in my pants. It was my cell phone (get your mind out of the gutter!) informing me that I had missed a call. When I clicked over to see who had called, I instantly felt a lump form in my stomach: it was from a 407 number, which I knew to be the area code for Orlando. Unfortunately, it takes a moment for voice mail notifications to appear, so I stared at my phone for what seemed like minutes until the alert came up. Listening to the voice mail, it confirmed my fear: I'd missed the call from our Wedding Consultant.

I feel like I need a wall like this to plan this wedding.

This was my biggest concern with planning the Disney World wedding coming to life. The time difference between Seattle and Orlando is going to make planning things difficult, and often I cannot stop to answer my cell phone while at work due to being in a meeting. I then spent the next two hours attempting to get our wedding consultant on the phone, but unfortunately for Girl Scout Fiancée and I it seemed as though our Wedding Consultant was busy on the other line. Finally, right in the middle of my lunch break, I managed to get through to Diane.

Knowing how busy the Wedding Consultants must be, I wanted to make sure we got everything squared away as efficiently as possible. First, though, I used the trick of three-way-calling to bring Girl Scout Fiancée in on the phone call so she could hear and contribute to the conversation. Diane started by congratulating us (both me when I first called, and Girl Scout Fiancée when she got on the line), and her enthusiasm really came through on the phone. No matter how much concern I have over planning from this far away, so far my experiences with the Disney staff have always left me feeling like, at the very least, they really care about helping you have the best experience possible.

A Cast Member will break a man's legs for you, as long as you're a resort guest.

Diane then confirmed our target date (April 30th), location (Sea Breeze Point at the Boardwalk), and time (late afternoon), which presumably she had from the notes left by the representative we spoke to last week. She also asked, without prompting, whether we had anything we wanted to do for our guests after the wedding, and we told her we wanted to do an Illuminations dessert party in Epcot. Interestingly, she told me at the time that the option available for Escape weddings was the Canada Overlook, where we had been looking at photos of UK Lochside. Canada Overlook is fine (they're right next to each other, after all), though I have some concerns about the trees restricting our view of the fireworks, but some photos that I've seen online dispelled those concerns for me. I know Disney wouldn't even have a spot for a dessert party that had a bad view, but it did offer a mild surprise when I'd been expecting us to have some degree of choice in the matter. Still, Escape weddings are more limited, and I'm just as happy with Canada Overlook as I would be with Lochside, I think. We were also informed that we would need to arrange to travel backstage to Epcot in order for Girl Scout Fiancée to enter the park in her wedding dress, which we had been expecting, and were told that our other guests would be able to meet a Cast Member to be escorted to the dessert party.

With the dates and times for our wedding and dessert party in hand, Diane told us the next step would be for her to confirm that those spots were available, and that it could take a day or so for her to receive that confirmation from another department. In the meantime, she told us to expect another e-mail from her asking for certain information that would go on our wedding contract. A few hours later, I received that very e-mail as promised, and promptly turned it back around. The questions asked were mostly about how names and addresses were to appear on contracts, and also some basic contact information questions, the confirmation number for our hotel reservations, and some basic questions about who can make decisions about the wedding (in this case, only Girl Scout Fiancée and I).

"Please write the name of your soul on line four." "Why?" "No reason."

Diane then informed us that the next step would be for us to receive the contracts via e-mail. We'll then need to print them out, sign them, and send them (including our deposit) back to her. Once the contract and deposit has been received, Diane will then hand us off to our actual wedding coordinator, who will be helping us make all of the actual decisions about the wedding proper. Still, we've got a reservation down on our wedding site and dessert party site for the exact times we want, and that's a big step in the right direction.

The one question I have, that I don't yet have an answer for because I didn't send it until after their office closed (again, yay time difference) involves our hotel reservations. Right now, we have a reservation with a small AAA discount, but I'm aware that annual passholders and people having their weddings at Disney World are often eligible for some pretty nice discounts on hotels. I'm a little concerned about what's going to happen when/if I need to re-book our resort stay to take advantage of a better discount, but we'll see what they say.