The Benefits (and Limits) of Using Tech to Plan a Wedding

This may sound unromantic, but before the internet era, wedding planning was a lot like car shopping. To find a place to get married, you had to read print ads with limited information designed to lure you in for a visit and pressure you into, well, committing.

Nowadays, you can be more informed with the help of tech resources like online reviews, wedding planning tools and location websites. But much hasn’t changed: Venues still bombard you with heavily doctored brochures (now digitized!) that make it difficult to compare prices. These ads often lowball you with baseline costs, and venues only share detailed pricing information after you pay a visit.

“Once you’re there, it’s going to be harder for you to say no than to just deal with a faceless website,” said Michael Crider, who wrote “The Guy’s Guide to Dating, Getting Hitched, and Surviving the First Year of Marriage.” Then, the real costs emerge. “Do you want your guests to be seated? If so, you have to pay extra for the chairs.”

Tech tools aim to make tasks like wedding planning more efficient and easier to manage. Yet the wedding industry remains complex. I’ve been learning this the hard way. After my partner and I got engaged, we were immediately overwhelmed when rummaging through PDFs and websites in search of venues, vendors and photographers. Ultimately, we caved and hired a coordinator to do the heavy lifting.

Here’s what we learned about the benefits and limitations of using tech tools to plan a wedding. At least so far, since our wedding is not until next year.

The vast majority of engaged couples turn to the web to help plan their weddings. The two most prominent digital wedding planning products these days are Wedding Wire and The Knot.

Both offer web and mobile apps, which include a comprehensive set of tools to plan a wedding from start to finish, including picking a venue, finding vendors, setting up a registry and creating a budget.

It’s complicated. On average, couples hire 13 vendors to put together a wedding, according to Wedding Wire.

The big planning tools offer searchable lists of vendors and venues, with reviews and links to the businesses’ own sites. People can also turn to broader review websites like Yelp to help vet vendors, photographers and musicians.

Now that you have a clear picture of how thorough the top wedding planning tools are, let’s discuss their limits.

Because of the deeply personal nature of a wedding, you can’t just plan everything with a few taps on a smartphone or by sitting in front of a computer. Eventually you will have to talk to lots of people the old school way: on the phone or in person.

That becomes evident when you turn to these tools to try and customize your wedding. Couples have always wanted their special day to be unique and to reflect their interests. In a survey of about 2,700 couples by Wedding Wire, 85 percent said having a unique, personalized wedding experience was a top priority.

With tools like Pinterest, which so easily lets you collect photos of décor and destinations from across the web, who could resist adding a personal touch? My fiancée and I have been pinning photos of poetry quotations and vintage typewriters that we want as decorations at our reception. This makes giving directions to our coordinator especially easy: We simply shared our Pinterest board.

But such customization makes it difficult for couples to obtain realistic bottom-line costs from venues and vendors, said Lauren Goodson, a director of consumer insights for Wedding Wire. The more you tweak, the more hours that go into different components of a ceremony, cocktail hour and reception. Sites like Wedding Wire offer price estimates for some nuances, but eventually you have to move on from tech tools and engage directly with vendors.

“The cookie-cutter approach is less and less effective,” Goodson said. “It does take some interaction with the venue to address specific needs of a couple.”

She added that couples often underestimate the cost of their wedding by 40 percent, in part because they are initially unaware of the costs of their customizations.

After becoming jaded with online brochures, my fiancée and I began asking venues to send us their budget spreadsheets. Neatly arranged cells and numbers are the opposite of romantic, but this was the only way for us to craft a realistic budget including our modifications without losing our minds.

One of the biggest advantages of using online tools is the power of reviews. You can find feedback about venues and vendors on a wealth of websites, like Facebook, Yelp, as well as Wedding Wire and The Knot.

Crider, the author, said that when he and his wife were planning their wedding, they visited the Facebook pages for vendors like caterers, cake bakers and photographers to see what people were saying about them. They found the reviews to be very reliable.

Online reviews are especially helpful for destination weddings. My partner and I opted to have our wedding out of state, but because of time constraints, we have not yet flown out to visit the venues. At the same time, venues fill up quickly so we knew we had to book something soon, sight unseen.

Fortunately, with the extra assurance of reviews on The Knot and Wedding Wire, we were able to tentatively book a venue that was recommended by our coordinator before we go to visit it in a few months.

My fiancée and I are only at the beginning of this process, though later on we do plan on resorting to tech tools for buying decorations, ordering printed invitations, making an informational website for guests and creating a registry.

There’s one thing we probably won’t buy online though: what we wear. For an event this monumental, we had better look good.

Crider said he and his wife ordered their wedding bands and outfits online. Even though they knew their measurements, they had to return the rings because they didn’t fit.

“It was a crapshoot with the wedding rings,” he said.

But it doesn’t always have to be that way. Crider and his wife buy each other new wedding bands every year, picking the traditional material associated with each anniversary. This year, for their seventh anniversary, they ordered copper rings on Etsy — and they fit.