Wedding vendor package review:
compare quotes and choose with confidence.

A vendor package has two layers. The brochure layer is the mood: beautiful photos, warm copy, a headline price. The contract layer is what you are actually buying: hours of coverage, number of staff, what happens in overtime, delivery timelines, cancellation terms, and what is quietly excluded. Most package-review mistakes happen because couples compare brochure layers — 'this one felt nicer' — while the real differences live in the contract layer.

Before comparing anything, normalize each quote to the same shape. For every package, write down: the all-in price including tax and service fees, exactly what is delivered (hours, headcount, items), what costs extra (overtime rate, travel, extra edits, tastings), and the payment and cancellation schedule. A caterer at €95 per head with staff and rentals included is often cheaper than one at €80 per head plus 'staffing and equipment quoted separately'. You cannot see that until both quotes are written in the same format.

Rule of thumb: if a line item is vague — 'assistance on the day', 'standard décor included' — it is a question, not a feature. Email the vendor and get the specific answer in writing before you score anything.

• All-in price with tax, service and travel fees
• Exact deliverables: hours, headcount, item counts
• Overtime and extras rates in writing
• Payment schedule and cancellation terms
• Anything vague turned into a written question

The core of a fair package review is a scorecard: a fixed list of criteria per category, scored one to five, identical for every vendor you consider. The criteria differ by category — what makes a great photographer has nothing to do with what makes a great caterer — but within a category, every vendor answers to exactly the same list. That is what stops the last vendor you met (always the most charming) from winning by recency.

The vendor directory in The Private Wedding App builds this in. When you add a venue, it asks you to score capacity fit, price transparency, availability flexibility, in-house catering rules and rain plan — each with a tip explaining what a five looks like versus a two. Add a photographer and the criteria switch: portfolio consistency across full galleries (not highlight reels), coverage hours versus your actual timeline, delivery time in writing, second-shooter policy. Caterers get scored on tasting quality, dietary flexibility, staff-to-guest ratio and what the per-head price really includes. Florists, musicians, videographers, hair and makeup — every category ships with its own guided criteria and tips, plus free-text pros and cons so the human impression is captured too, just in its own box instead of contaminating the numbers.

Score vendors right after the meeting or tasting, while details are fresh. A vendor scored three weeks later gets scored on charm, not substance.

Once two or more vendors in the same category have scorecards and quote amounts, the decision stops being abstract. Select them and open the comparison view: star scores per criterion in aligned columns, quoted prices next to each other, pros and cons stacked. The pattern almost always reveals itself immediately — one photographer wins on portfolio and delivery time but loses badly on coverage hours; whether that trade is worth €600 is now a concrete question instead of a feeling.

The comparison only allows vendors from the same category, on purpose. Comparing a florist's score to a DJ's score means nothing; comparing two caterers criterion by criterion means everything. Try it in the live demo below — the vendor directory is pre-filled with venues, photographers, caterers and florists, each with scorecards and quotes.

Tap to
explore

Create yours →

A vendor review is not one decision, it is a dozen running in parallel over months. Venues close first, photographers book out twelve to eighteen months ahead, florists can wait. Without a system, you end up scrolling email threads to remember whether the second caterer ever sent the revised quote.

The fix is a simple pipeline. Every vendor lives in one of five statuses: wishlist (found them, not contacted), contacted (waiting on a reply), quoted (package in hand — this is where the scorecard work happens), booked, or rejected. Each vendor card holds the quote amount, contact details, notes, and the scorecard, so the entire history of a decision sits in one place. At a glance you can see that you have three photographer quotes ready to compare but only one caterer has replied — which tells you exactly what to chase this week.

Keep rejected vendors in the list instead of deleting them. If your booked florist cancels eight months in, your runner-up — with scores and quote still attached — is one status change away.

The final step of a package review is the one most couples skip: writing the real number into the budget. The quote you compared was the package price; the number that matters is the contracted total, and it needs to land in your budget the day you sign, not three months later when you wonder where the money went.

In The Private Wedding App this happens automatically. Mark a vendor as booked and the quote amount syncs into the matching category of your wedding budget tracker — venue quotes into the venue line, the photographer's package into photo and video, the caterer into catering. Your budget stops being an estimate you set in month one and becomes a live record of what you actually committed to, vendor by vendor.

By the end, the review method has quietly produced everything else you need: a contact list of every booked vendor, a written record of what each package includes for the inevitable 'was the cake stand included?' conversation, and a budget that matches reality.