Bad planner review

Hi BBBs! We got married last month and while we had a great day our planner ended up being a huge, huge disappointment.

For background, we hired a partial planner after we had all the big items booked about 6 months prior to the wedding to help us with the details and achieving our vision. This planner advertises as someone who helps couples achieve their “unique” and “authentic” vision. Our first meeting with him went great and then it slowly started going downhill. Some examples include -

• Slow to follow-up. We would typically not receive any updates on his action items until the next monthly meeting, making it challenging to make progress in between our monthly meetings.
  • Only recommended one vendor per category. Per our contract, he is supposed to provide “a curated handful”. For examples, for a rental company he sent us one that did neon style furniture for influencer events which did not match the vision at all. And he knew that!
  • Did not follow through with contract negotiation as one of his services. The hair stylist he referred me to charged an obnoxious travel fee for about 2x the amount of hours it was going to take her and I asked him about this to see if he could reach out. He just shrugged and said I can find someone else if you want. (Note - I ended booking the hair stylist and she was great! It is what it is in this industry. There’s always an absurd fee.)
  • Per contract, supposed to take over ALL vendor communication 6 weeks out. Did not reach out until 1.5 weeks prior to wedding. Did not confirm timelines with florist. Florist showed up late and he emailed them “[email protected]” about an hour after they were supposed to arrive. He didn’t even get the actual contact information of the florist staff who would be there day of!
  • Day of our timelines were immediately off. Photography took over an hour to do the flatlay. Florist was late, etc. I understand why a photographer is going to want to get the perfect flatlay shot but I feel that it is a planner’s responsibility to keep the day running accordingly to schedule. My husband ended up having to say something to the photographer. Ceremony started late (due to a venue issue - not planner’s fault) and everything after had to be cut short. Our DJ was the one doing time checks with us to keep things moving, not our planner.
  • End of night our planner didn’t pack up everything into our car leaving us to go back to the venue to pick the rest of it up and he packed up our car so nonsensically we didn’t know if everything would fit into a suburban… when we delivered everything to the venue in a mid size SUV just fine. It felt like a final f-u.
  • Did not ask vendors for prices for up charges. He would always email us “they can do that for an up charge” and we would have to ask every. single. time for him to tell us the amount and he would say “oh I have to go back to them and ask” wasting so much time.

This doesn’t even cover all of the issues! About 4-6 weeks out, we sent him an email outlining our concerns about his timeliness and follow-up.

Now the kicker is this planner has exclusively 5 star reviews on every website! It’s clear to me we were not a match but I don’t know how to write this review without seeming like a crazy outlier - any advice would be much appreciated!