Wedding planners in Tuscany: how to choose one

This page used to be a ranked top ten. Each planner had a number, a Style line, a Best for line and a sentence of praise — one was credited with "genuine warmth", another with "award-winning creative design".

We had never met any of them. The rankings were ours, the styles were invented, and the award was not attached to any award we could find.

It is gone. We do not rank the businesses we list, and we do not take payment for a position in a list. What follows is what we can actually tell you.

What we found when we read their own sites

We went through the twenty-one planners listed on this site and recorded what each publishes about itself. Two things stood out.

Almost none describes a style in words you could compare. Every one of them writes about elegance, authenticity and attention to detail. Not one uses a term specific enough to tell you how their weddings differ from the next planner's. That is why our vendor profiles carry no style field: there was nothing to put in it that came from them rather than from us.

Very few publish anything operational. Only one states how many weddings it takes: Floé Weddings limits each planner to fifteen a year. Only one publishes prices. A handful name the people who run the business; several do not.

So a shortlist built from websites will be built from photographs. The questions below are how you get past that.

The questions that actually separate planners

How many weddings do you take in a season, and how many fall in my month? The single most useful question, and the one almost nobody publishes the answer to.

Who will be on site on the day? At several of these businesses the person answering your emails and the person running your wedding are not the same. That is not a problem — it is a problem if you find out in September.

Which comune have you worked with? Rules and fees differ sharply between towns. Greve in Chianti authorises named private villas for the legal ceremony; Florence does not. A planner who has worked in your comune knows which questions to ask it.

What exactly does your fee cover, and is it inclusive of IVA? Full planning, design, on-the-day coordination and paperwork assistance are four different services, and different planners bundle them differently.

Do you have a minimum budget? Some do. It is a fair question and a fast filter.

What the profiles on this site do tell you

Each planner's page carries what that business publishes about itself, with the source and the date we checked it. Concretely, that includes things worth filtering on:

• Where they are based. Poggibonsi sits between Florence and Siena; Fiesole is above Florence; one planner works from a village between Bolgheri and Volterra.
• Which languages they state. Seven of twenty-one say. Several present only in Italian, which matters if you are planning from the UK or the US.
• What else they cover. Some work only in Tuscany; others list Puglia, Lake Como, the Amalfi Coast, Provence and the Côte d'Azur.
• What kind of business it is. One is a travel agency of thirty-five years standing rather than an owner-planner — useful if you want travel and accommodation handled alongside the wedding.
• Unusual backgrounds. One planner came to the work after twenty years in the hotel industry, which is twenty years of accommodation blocks, guest handling and running a building to a schedule.

Browse them all in the wedding planner directory.

Do you need one at all?

Not legally. What a planner mainly buys you is access to information the market does not publish — of the twenty-six venues on this site, three state a capacity and none states a price. A well-organised couple with one venue and a simple plan can manage without. Our full answer is here.

Why there is no ranking here

Because we would have to invent it. We have not attended these weddings, spoken to these couples or seen these planners work. Any site that hands you a numbered top ten of Tuscan planners is either reporting a commercial arrangement it has not disclosed, or making it up.

What we can do is show you what each business says about itself, tell you where that came from, and give you the questions that produce a real answer.