In July I received an email from someone else in DCE, saying they’d be stepping for J. That’s weird, I thought, but I was working a million hours and trying to get things finished up for the wedding, so I didn’t do anything until we were close to our final payment date at the end of August. About two weeks before it was due, I asked for a copy of the bill to make our final payment. They sent the bill in a different format, so I also asked to see the BEO once more, mentioning it took a bit to get it corrected with J. This is when I was told our ride mix-in wasn’t approved.
Apparently, even though I had been assured multiple times by J, it was not approved and on top of that, they do not do ride mix-ins on EMH nights. To make a long story short, we were obviously approved for our ride mix-in. But it was a lot of back and forth for over a week before we knew, in which I did mention that the Dessert Party had been the hardest part of the day to plan because J was not on top of things to begin, and it was disappointing and stress that I didn’t really need 3 weeks out. It didn’t help that I was going through the new planner’s assistant as he was out, and she wanted me to wait a week until he was back to move forward. I ended up contacting another planner he referred to in his out of office email. After the ride mix-in was straightened out, they asked if I had the media agreements for photo and video… No. So now it is September 5th, and I’m just sending these media agreements on to the vendors. You may remember right around then, there was this little storm going on, I think they called it Irma… So then I didn’t receive them back until just before the wedding, due to vendors being busy evacuating/hunkering down/not having power/living out of hotels. Understandable, but just another thing that upset me with DCE...
Here’s the thing: I understand it was not the new planner or assistant’s fault that this happened (and I told them that!), but I felt like these were things that should have been noticed and been addressed when they took over our event. It was a month from when I was notified they were taking over, and when they told us about the issues. I’m sure there was a scramble with whatever happened with J, and I probably should have verified everything in July when they transferred my event, but I still feel they should have been going over all events with a fine tooth comb, and then updating the customers. I was getting calls from DCE on the day of the wedding still - I think it was things like they forgot to tell me where guests without tickets should meet them, if I remember right - but actually Aly had my phone and fielded these calls.
While I’m really happy we had a dessert party and how it turned out, I didn’t appreciate the feelings and stress of being pushed off or having the ball dropped for our event. A $2300 event may be peanuts for Disney, but it was almost 20% of our budget for the day and a lot of money for us. We could have spent much less just getting everyone a ticket to the normal dessert party, which we considered. I still also think it’s bizarre they didn’t have anyone act like they were in charge of the event. The only cast members there were either serving or guarding the bridges into the area. One of them could have been pulling double duty with that, but no one mentioned it. The only cast member who came up and introduced herself was the lady who led us to Soarin’.
So this long-winded review really just winds down to not being overly impressed with the DCE team for our event. I've seen some other hit or miss stories about working with them, so I think that if we would ever be finding ourselves planning something through them again, I would be extra vigilant with the details and not wait on them for things.
Just like last night, we had stopped at the store and DH needed gas, and I was like we can go over and use the last of the fuel points from April (70 cents off per gallon) PLUS we can pay with the Kroger gift card I bought last week with my Freedom, so it's like getting 7.5% back instead of the 3% you'd get with your gas card! He was just like, whatever you say... 
I felt like we got pretty good bang for our buck overall, much better than I figured it would be with Disney before I did my research. You win for wedding costs though 
Most likely because I was with DCE, and I’ve heard that DFTW reads the Disboards.
We planned FPs for Mission Space and Spaceship Earth before lunch at Garden Grill at 11:30am, then had an early afternoon FEA FP and planned on snacking our way around the world.
He headed back to the room to lay down.
This was defintiely NOT our thing. We tossed it looking mostly untouched. 
Oh it was funny.
