Every bride figures out more and more as they plan their wedding, being that it is the first wedding they have ever planned... the further I planned my wedding the more I regretted signing a contract with Tad Akers.
First, I feel continuously taken advantage of. I had a similar experience to shellshell86 who also has written a review. Tad Akers continuously tried to make their services seem like a ""great deal"" when they were up-charging the hell out of us over and over again. Once you sign a contract you are obligated to use companies contracted through them which is ""included"" in the pricing. You are required to get your cake, dj, alcohol, linens, and more through Tad Akers. This may seem like a more easy approach to planning a wedding, but not when they refuse to give you an accurate itemized receipt. Teresa and her crew also own a flower shop which conveniently is not inlcuded in the price.
The DJ they're contracted with never showed up for our meeting, we waited at Starbucks for an hour before he called. The number we were given on multiple occasions was invalid for the DJ. On the night of the wedding we had previously requested that 5 specific songs be played at some point throughout the night. I kept waiting for the song I had planned to dance to with my stepdad to, to play and it never did. Coincidentally I never danced with him the night of my wedding which is something that I will never be able to do over again. We could understand if all of our requests were not played if we had given the DJ a list of 100 songs of something, BUT WE ONLY REQUESTED 5!
We were really disappointed with the cake company we were required to use through Tad Akers as well... the cake tasting is supposed to be one of the most fun experiences when planning a wedding! When we arrived at the cake place the woman who owns the place saw us waiting but did not come to help us for 5 minutes. When she finally did approach us she did not introduce herself or smile.. (which she did not end up doing through out our whole meeting.) She told my husband she could not make the cake he wanted. When the meeting was over she ran out to her car and sped away. This was really comforting to us, considering she must have been rushing through the whole meeting. When we e-mailed Tad Akers to complain, which we did so in a very polite way, they proceeded to tell us that they hadn't gotten a complaint about their cake lady in 8 years and acted like we were crazy. Our cakes came out nicely for the most part but mine was lop-sided.
Over all any advice Tad Akers gave us was bs, they just tried to squeeze every penny out of us that they could. They tried to make everything on the wedding day very systematic. We got out of using catering through them but not even including catering our bill came out to a large amount of money for not much work by them. There is so much more I could say but this review and the other reviews should be enough for you to not use Tad Akers... there are plenty of other great places out there so don't waste your money here.
I just wanted to include a couple more things... we had a HUMONGOUS line of people waiting for food (being served by Tad Akers staff) and once people got their food it was cold... the bride and grooms food included. They also turned on the lights at exactly 11 o'clock when our four hour window of time was up. They could have announced that we were leaving and everyone would have followed, instead they gave off a feel of a high school dance ending and wanting everyone to get out of there asap.
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