New Wedding Coordinator

In my last post, I alluded to another unexpected change of plans involving our wedding coordinator. One of the best parts of having a Disney wedding is having an assigned coordinator who is there to take care of all of the planning for you, and it's doubly important for those of us planning a wedding from afar. Up to this point, our wedding coordinator, Danny, has made us very happy. He's always been able to answer our questions, and though he's a pretty busy guy (nearly every e-mail we sent him got an out-of-office autoreply indicating that he was out helping run a wedding), he always got back to us in a timely manner. In fact, during the process of finalizing our BEO (the Banquet Event Order, which I'll write an entire post about soon), I got an e-mail from him at around 10 PM on a Sunday night—10 PM our time, which would have been around one o'clock in the morning in Florida.

No man, it's cool, I totally wasn't doing anything important...

A few months ago, though, Girl Scout Fiancée started hearing rumblings on the Internet from other Disney brides that they had been reassigned to a different wedding coordinator. At first, we didn't think anything of it; surely, we would have heard from Disney if that was happening to us. As time went on, the rumors grew more plentiful, and finally we just broke down and sent Danny an e-mail.  After all, at the point where we heard these rumors, we were less than 90 days from the wedding, and we were in the process of finalizing everything and getting the budget squared away.

XCKD's take on Internet rumors. Too bad Snopes couldn't help us confirm...

Danny e-mailed us back fairly quickly to let us know that it is true that he was being promoted to a position where he would be handling only Wishes weddings, the next tier up from the Escape package we are going with. He assured us in an e-mail that he would remain our wedding coordinator for as long as it took for him to train a replacement, and that it was possible that he would remain our wedding coordinator through the entire process anyways. In a separate call with Girl Scout Fiancée, Danny told her that he was going to continue being our wedding coordinator, even though someone else might work with us on the day of the wedding itself, and that he'd like to schedule a call with us to go over our BEO. We found a time that worked, scheduled the call, and went about our business merrily.

The night before the scheduled call, I realized that it was odd that I'd not heard from Danny; with our previous calls, he always checked in the day before to confirm that we were still available. I shot off  a quick e-mail asking if the call was still on, and was unsurprised to get back an autoresponse so quickly. I was about to delete it without looking at it when the response's text caught my eye: it was a mailer daemon response, an automated message generated when there's an error with the e-mail system. According to the autoresponse, Danny's e-mail address was no longer valid in the Disney system. OK, maybe it's just a glitch; they could be updating server software, or something. I got up early in the morning for the call, and decided to send off another e-mail to check in, getting the same mailer daemon auto response. I was getting a little concerned (who wouldn't, when the person you've been working with literally the entire time vanishes from the system without a warning), but decided to see what happened that morning. I warned Girl Scout Fiancée that we might not get a call at all, but to our surprise my phone rang at precisely the right time.

This is what Google Image Search provided for "mailer daemon" BTW

On the other end was, as we would soon discover, our new wedding coordinator, Sarah. As it turns out, Danny was forced to leave Disney's Fairytale Weddings due to a serious illness in the family. It's very sad, and I hope things turn out well for him, as he was always helpful and really made us feel special. We had the call with Sarah that we would have had with Danny, which was not just going over the BEO, but also a large portion of a "getting to know you" experience. Fortunately, Sarah seems just as capable, enthusiastic, and helpful as Danny, and I could tell that Girl Scout Fiancée felt better once we were done with the call, as well. Sarah had been able to answer some questions that Girl Scout Fiancée had about both the photography and the flowers, and by the end of the call our concerns were assuaged and we felt like things were on the right track for our wedding.

I feel like we may have dodged a bullet, here. Changing wedding coordinators mid-stream for a long-distance wedding could, potentially, cause chaos in the proceedings, but Sarah handled the transition well, and really put us at ease. It proved the maxim that I've come to believe about wedding planning ("Everything changes"), but in this case it seems like Disney was able to make the change relatively painless. Since then, Sarah has been very responsive to us, and even worked with Girl Scout Fiancée to find out who our photographer is supposed to be in advance, and worked with the flower department to put together a bouquet that Girl Scout Fiancée is very excited about.