Customer Reviews

The Best Wedding Reception Ever!

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My fiance and I are experiencing a bit of a role reversal, in that I am in the minority of grooms, one who is the primary planner/coordinator of our upcoming wedding. My fiance has great taste and is involved with all major decisions, but is also an extremely busy professional, so I was happy to step up as the experienced party planner, doing the homework and pre-negotiating with vendors, before my fiance and I together make final selections of vendors and the plan. However, I had never planned a wedding before, so I've bought many books and read lots of websites and paged through many magazines (I don't think I can look at another magazine ad of a bride-model laying horizontal on a couch without snickering). Virtually everything is written for the bride who typically plans the wedding - which to me means there is a heavy emphasis on decorations and flowers and invitations and linens and color schemes... it was all driving me crazy as a guy trying to put together a wedding plan that is simply fun and action oriented, while still allows for nice things. I've attended many dozens of weddings over the years and I've kept an eye on what makes weddings enjoyable and memorable: keep it festive, keep guests involved, and make sure there is time for the happy couple to spend time with each of the guests. I never saw any correlation with the size of the party, the location, the decorations, even the food quality (and I'm a big foodie), with how successful and fun the wedding was. Given this perspective, I looked and looked for wedding planning advice in all the books and magazines and websites, hoping to find action oriented advice for having a festive wedding reception - frankly, I found little useful advice. Finally, just three months before our upcoming wedding, I have found the book I really needed - on the recommendation of a wedding DJ friend (who lives and works in another state), I ordered Peter Merry's book, which I have found to be chock full of actionable ideas from an experienced wedding DJ/entertainment director. He focuses on the concept of entertainment and leaves decorations and other more frivolous things to the other books. He is a welcome voice, a rare male perspective in wedding planning books, that a planning groom, and presumably planning brides as well, needs. I've already made adjustments to the reception agenda and found validation with some activity ideas we already had in place. Rest assured, there will be great food and many touches of elegance in the design of our wedding, but I am now more confident as ever we will have a truly festive wedding with Peter Merry's advice influencing our plan. Many thanks to the author - the advice is easily 10 times worth the cover price of the book. I strongly recommend this book to anyone planning their wedding.

As not only an event coordinator, but a bride-to-be I found this book extremely helpful. After having experience as a wedding planner I didn't think that I needed any reading materials to help plan my reception. I'm so grateful to have received this book as a gift! There are so many awesome ideas and tips that I'm excited to use or create my own spin off.
Another nice thing about this is that it's broken down so it's really easy to find what you want. So even if you don't think you want to read all of it, it's not an issue to go through and find the things that you need the most guidance on.
Be sure to check this book out. It will be one of the best wedding planning tools that you can get!

Useful if you are planning a large wedding reception. Very useful if you can afford to hire a super talented DJ/MC and/or a band (as Chapter 7 will scare you away from any other option).

However, for the "intimate wedding" or "destination wedding", like the one I am planning, the book is not as helpful. With a budget of <$10K, only about 40 guests attending, 1 bridesmaid and 1 best man, and guests who would leave a reception rather than run the risk of being singled out to play a game or dance, I did not find a lot of useful tips in the book.

On a positive note, there was one example in the book that included a wedding without dancing where they filled the time with games, instead (which wouldn't work for guests that are scared off by the threat of public humiliation). Plus, there were a couple of nice sentimental ideas such as the Unity Candle and the Anniversary Time Capsule, where the guests filled out advice cards to be placed into a metal container and opened on the couple's 25 wedding anniversary. But those ideas comprised about 3 pages of the book and many of the other suggestions needed an MC to execute.

I still think you can have the best wedding reception...ever! without having a large guest-list, large budget, dancing, games and an MC. Perhaps there are restaurants that specialize in this kind of thing? Perhaps providing icebreakers at the table? Perhaps, if the wedding is small, a large dining table that everyone sits at so everyone feels included? However, you won't find ideas for that kind of wedding in this book.

My advice to you if you are not planning to have a DJ/MC or you have a quiet family is to either avoid the book altogether, or go to a bookstore and flip through it for the occasional sentimental idea to incorporate into your ceremony.

As a full-time mobile DJ / MC, I feel that Peter Merry's book provides brides and grooms with a chance to focus their vision in terms of planning their wedding event. It is possible to be both realistic and creative and to spend wisely without cutting corners. However, planning and research are essential in order to create an outstanding, memorable experience for your friends and family on your wedding day.

Peter Merry's example weddings and lists of pros and cons provide brides and grooms with a number of realistic examples of how their planning might turn out given different choices you might make. His years of experience as a "Wedding Entertainment Director" allow him to address a variety of options, such as the daytime wedding vs. the evening wedding, scheduling a wedding at different times throughout the year, when and how to schedule photos, and what type of entertainment to hire.

With weddings costing tens of thousands of dollars and taking one to two years to plan, reading a few books and articles on how to invest your time and money only makes sense. I highly recommend _The Best Wedding Reception Ever!_ by Peter Merry as one of these pieces of research. It's certainly the kind of book that will get a bride and groom (and their family and friends) talking about their ideas for their wedding day.

This is one of the first books on weddings that does NOT talk about the flowers, the dresses, the food, etc. This book focuses on one thing and does it well; your entertainment at your reception.

Yes, I will admit that I work as a mobile DJ and entertain at weddings and am somewhat biased on the entertainment part of the reception. But as such, I have seen many Brides and Grooms who focus so much time an energy on the visual aspects of the reception (linens, colors, flowers) and not the entertainment so that they don't seem to have fun at their own reception. If you read this book and take from it what you want, then you will have a better chance of having fun at your reception.

My daughter got engaged in Nov. '08 with an Oct. '09 wedding date. She hired a DJ in January. In late July, the DJ found out he would not be able to do it & he found a replacement DJ. It was on the new DJ's website that I read about this book. Fortunately, he has read it and uses the ideas in his full time DJ business. For those of you who have read the book, you know how vital the role of DJ is for successful wedding receptions. He has met with my daughter and her fiance a few times to get information about them, the bridal party, songs they like, etc. This will help him build background knowledge so he can personalize the evening and give them "the best wedding reception ever!"

If you are a wedding planner, a wedding DJ or are soon to get married, this book is as good as it gets. Unfortunately, the author, Peter Merry is not only a brilliant wedding entertainment professional and excellent communicator, he is a capitalist who pursues his goals like a shark in a feeding frenzy, with no concern for his prey or for those injured by the collateral damage he causes.

Merry has created an exclusive middleman wedding DJ talent agency (of sorts), "The Wedding Entertainment Directors Guild" and he promotes it again and again in his book. In doing so, he marginalizes those who are not members. It's sort of a "Good Old Boy/Girl" organization furthering their individual careers by putting down other members of the industryand telling clients, they are the only ones capable of doing the job well.

It costs over $1000 to become a member of the Wedding Entertainment Directors Guild and $900 in annual dues. It has about 25 current members. It appears Merry wants to increase those numbers by recruiting with this book. He also wants Guild Members to be able to charge top dollar. Some would argue overpriced, but that is another topic.

There are many great Wedding DJ's or Hosts who are not members of Peter Merry's WED Guild. They are qualified, talented and competent. So buy the book, ignore the whole Wedding Entertainment Director's Guild thing, and enjoy some great tips and a lot of valuable information.

Wow! What a great book. Something really needed in the world of weddings. Advice on how to entertain your guests and keep them entertained. I love all of the suggestions in this book. Very well written, easy to understand and so helpful. Thank you Peter Merry for this wealth of information. I will tell everyone I know about the Best Wedding Reception...Ever!

I'm only 1/3 of the way through this book and I can already tell that this book will change EVERYTHING about how brides will plan their weddings to the way we view the timeline of a reception, to the quality of the entertainment brides choose, and other little nuances that can make a basic reception a UNIQUE reception, and in turn, making it the BEST WEDDING RECEPTION...EVER!

Peter is an amazing entertainer and director. He approaches weddings like a stage play, so that everything has it's place, and everything runs perfectly. It's what has granted him the success that he has, and why he can command top dollar for his services.

Buy this book today!

As an Entertainment Host (DJ), I was looking for something I could direct my clients to for some great information for their wedding. I knew that this book existed based on all of the hype about in the DJ community and I bought it to give it a look-see.

Mr. Merry has presented some very good ideas in this book and I would encourage you to purchase it as part of your bridal library.

The part that I do not agree with lies in Chapter seven and deals with full-time vs. part-time DJs and pricing. Mr. Merry fails to consider that there are some part-time DJs in our industry that remain part-time because they simply do not wish to enter the business on a full-time basis; I am one of these people and I do communicate with my clients very well and also give them excellent customer service.

In regard to pricing, the advice I will give you is to check out some web sites that can assist in determining the potential cost of a wedding in your area and build a budget based on that. Then, even though some DJs hate this, shop around. Lastly, interview at least three candidate companies and at most five. I put the limit on five because after that you tend to get into information overload.

As I said, the book is good when you take the section on pricing and part-time vs. full-time.