Please avoid!
My fiancée (now wife) and I first contacted The Wedding Travel Company (TWTC) to plan our wedding (to be held in Zante in September 2023) at the end of November 2022. Whilst we were initially warmly greeted by our first handler; this ended up being the beginning of a difficult relationship with TWTC and ultimately led to a very disappointing wedding day overall for us. There were several issues and reasons related to this and are listed below; However the main complaints we have are that it is not explicitly clear on TWTC’s website that they subcontract much of their wedding planning work in Zante to another company (Zante Weddings) and the terrible customer service we received throughout causing immense stress. Reasons for our complaint with TWTC are as follows:
• We were not provided with any clear prior indication that TWTC would use subcontractors (Zante Weddings) based in Greece to facilitate our wedding on a local level. These subcontractors turned out to be truly awful, due to their poor communication, lack of foresight and simple lack of care towards us. This, coupled with language barriers and cultural differences, made the execution of our wedding ultimately a disaster. The lack of advance warning from TWTC that they used subcontractors, obviously meant that it took us by surprise and thus created unneeded stress and confusion for us during the planning stage of our wedding. We will review Zante Wedding separately (and in more detail) as is fair, but please avoid them like the plague if you are thinking of getting married in Zante– please just trust us and have an enjoyable wedding!
• When we eventually confronted TWTC regarding the above, we were told that Zante Weddings were in fact their “business partners”, despite us seeing very little communication between the two companies that would indicate a close working relationship. In fact, this contradicts something they said later in a phone call, that they are, in fact, subcontractors, which we assume was an accidental truthful slip as they then could not answer why this had been denied up until that point. To add to this, they refused to talk to each other directly and used us as the go-between – for example TWTC needed Zante Weddings to know that we had paid them their deposit, but they would not tell them themselves – all completely bizarre and clearly does not support TWTC claim to be close business partners with Zante Weddings.
• The moment we paid the deposit, we had complete radio silence from TWTC, despite us sending multiple emails to enquire as to what the next steps were. This obviously caused unnecessary stress and we even thought that they may have run off with our money at one point –this was supposed to be an exciting time but this caused much anxiety.
• When we finally managed to get hold of TWTC (having resorted to calling the sales number on the website), they stated that our previous handler (Leanne) had left the company, and this was the reason why we weren’t contacted. This shows a lack of due diligence and handover of responsibilities within the company. Thank goodness we called, as we do not know what would have happened – bearing in mind, we had already sent them £1000s of our money at this point.
• When we were finally assigned our next handler, we received an emailed "quote" on April 3, 2023, detailing the remaining outstanding funds and what they covered. However, there were several errors that needed to be addressed. We also had some specific questions related to TWTC, such as the purpose of the admin fee, and we requested a full itemised price list, which is neither unusual nor unreasonable. Consequently, we emailed back with some amendments to our quote:
- To discuss the above, our 2nd handler called my fiancée on 24th April 2024 on the phone while she was at work, with an incredibly confrontational and rude attitude.
o Their tone from the beginning of the call was aggressive, speaking over my fiancée the whole time even after my fiancée had calmly asked her not to.
o My fiancée was made to feel like any questions raised regarding her own wedding and the money going towards it, were unreasonable – for example, what the difference was between an admin fee and a wedding coordination fee (this has still not been answered).
o My fiancée was told to speak to Zante Weddings instead of TWTC and was made to feel like it was a huge inconvenience to know where our money was going. They kept repeating that my fiancée was not allowed to know what things were for or their cost because it was “just part of the package”.
o Her voice was getting louder and louder throughout the call, repeating my fiancée’s name until she was basically shouting. My fiancée had to calmly say that her aggressiveness was making her physically distressed (red faced, shaking, crying) and ask her to please calm down. At which point she did say it was not her intent, and yet her tone or volume did not change.
o Ultimately; she said we needed to make Zante weddings aware of the things we wanted to remove (again, bizarre that TWTC would not speak to their close “business partners” directly…) and furthermore, to this day, we have never received explanation of the admin fee or the itemised price list (so dodgy!)
- Bearing in mind that this was supposed to be an enjoyable time and that TWTC literally say their job (quoted from their website) is to make it easy with a “friendly team of wedding experts” to help you get your “dream wedding”; my fiancée was left crying and in shock from the phone call. She was in fact so loud, that all of my fiancée’s colleagues could hear the conversation and were in total shock – in fact, two colleagues who were engaged at the time, wanted to know who the wedding company was in order to avoid! Subsequently, we emailed TWTC with an official complaint asking for it to be escalated.
- Her manager responded to the complaint with another phone call to my fiancée and was initially very defensive, pretty much saying the same as handler 2 but in calmer tones. Surprisingly (not!), although they say they record calls (I assume for “quality and training purposes”), the phone call recording with handler 2 and my fiancée could not be found. Eventually the manager realised that TWTC were clearly in the wrong and changed her attitude slightly. We were then emailed an apology saying that handler 2 did not mean to upset us, and this was an internal matter – we have not received any further updates or outcomes to this “investigation”.
• The manager then became our tertiary handler, who for the most part handled the rest of the transaction OK. She rarely however CC’d me into our invoices, despite being asked several times (it really isn’t difficult to include the two people who are getting married in the same email chain). Furthermore, she did not make it clear to the subcontractors, Zante Weddings, about some key details regarding food and drinks which we had added onto our quote which prompted some further confusion over billing. The back and forth over the invoices and the many mistakes and details on there were truly demoralising.
• If you’ve got this far in our review – well done! I want to end by saying, that TWTC are essentially glorified travel agents and DO NOT CARE about your wedding. If you are getting married and looking for someone to take the stress away for an exotic, exciting wedding, please please do not use TWTC! You deserve an exciting stress-free time. If we can help one couple who sees this and does not book with them, we feel like we saved you! It’s nearly a year on from our wedding and we are still not quite over our experience and cannot even look at our wedding photos. My fiancée has had to have counselling over the terrible day and loss of funds that seemingly went quite wasted in many ways. We hope to one day be able to celebrate a day that should have been the best of our lives and was ruined. We’ll be doing another review for Zante Weddings separately.
