The short version: we make things happen, you decide what happens.
What you decide
The shape of the day. What time the ceremony starts, whether there are speeches and when, what the food is, who sits where, how late the music runs.
The look. Every design decision, from the flowers to the linen to whether there are candles on the tables.
Every supplier. You approve each one before we book them. Not a list of options we have already committed to, but an actual approval before a contract exists.
The run sheet. You read it and approve it before you fly. If something on it is not what you wanted, it changes.
The guest list, obviously, and the room block tiers, and who is hosted for what.
What we do
Find venues that fit your date, guest count and budget, and tell you honestly which ones do not.
Negotiate and hold the contracts, in Turkish, with Turkish suppliers, under Turkish law. This is the single largest practical value of a local planner and it is invisible from the outside.
Handle the documents. Sworn translations, notarisation, the health report appointment, the registry booking, and the interpreter who is legally required if neither of you speaks Turkish. What that involves.
Block guest rooms and give you a link to forward. How blocks work.
Build the run sheet, hour by hour, with every supplier arrival, every fallback and every phone number.
What we do on the day itself
Take the deliveries. Flowers at eight, sound at ten, cake in a refrigerated van at four. Somebody has to be there to sign for each one and to notice when a delivery is wrong.
Run the schedule so that nobody in your family is holding a clipboard. The run sheet exists so that the day happens without you managing it.
Stand on site from the first delivery in the morning to the last song, so the only thing you have to do is be there.
What a planner is not
A filter between you and reality.
If a venue has a music curfew, you will hear about it in week one, not on the night. If a date is genuinely bad (a religious holiday, a marathon closing the roads, a hotel mid-renovation) we will say so and lose the booking rather than let you discover it.
That is not a virtue we are claiming; it is a description of what makes the job work. A planner who only tells you good news is not saving you effort, they are deferring a problem to the worst possible moment.
The three things a local planner does that a remote one cannot
Stand in the venue. Not once, repeatedly, at different hours, with different weddings in it. That is where "the terrace at Villa Lykia goes into shade at five in September" comes from.
Contract in the local language and legal system. A dispute over a Turkish supplier contract is resolved under Turkish law, and being on the correct side of that is not something a spreadsheet solves.
Be there at eight in the morning. Somebody has to take delivery of the flowers, count the chairs and find the extension lead. On the day, physical presence is the entire job.
What changes when you cannot visit
Most of our couples never see the venue before the week of the wedding. What that changes is not the division of labour but the amount of evidence we owe you.
Video walk-throughs at the actual ceremony hour. Photographs of the wet-weather space, not descriptions. Tasting menus with notes. A run sheet detailed enough that you can picture the day from it.
Where couples find it hard
The couples who enjoy the process most are the ones who decide the big things early and then let go of the small ones. The couples who find it hard are the ones who try to hold both.
That is not a criticism — it is a genuinely difficult adjustment, particularly for people who are good at their jobs. The useful frame is: you are the client and the director, not the production manager. Directors approve; they do not chase deliveries.
What to expect from us specifically
One planner, by name, from the first call to the last dance. A written itemised quote within 24 hours of your first enquiry. Every payment invoiced to a registered company account. A run sheet two weeks out. And at least one thing you did not want to hear, early enough to act on it.
The practical companions to this piece
The month-by-month timeline and how contracts and payments work across a border.
