Review: Alejandro Limón Weddings

September 30, 2024

image

This February my wife and I got married in Los Cabos, Mexico where we were fortunate to host our family and friends at a few breathtaking natural venues during peak whale season.

To help us plan the wedding from abroad we chose Alejandro Limón Weddings (AL), a premium planner based of out Mexico City who we found through a friend. Though it was his first Cabo wedding and his first Indian wedding, we liked what we saw and took a chance. Like any planners, AL and his team had great strengths which I detail below. But working with him long distance was not without significant challenge. In total I’d give Alejandro and his team a 7.8 out of 10.


Strength: Venue selection

AL and his team showed us a number of beautiful venues in an around Los Cabos, and spent an entire weekend with us driving around the area to scout. The wedding venue we chose was private property that we found independently, but were connected to via AL’s connections. Given our vision we were very pleased with how the scouting trip went.

Strength: Art direction

AL’s art direction was the primary reason we chose to work with him. We found his past work to be elegant without being over the top. He was able to take our venues, each outdoor and naturally beautifully, and elevate them tastefully. I was particularly blown away by what he was able to do for our reception which took place in a long, thin canyon.

image

Strength: Hospitality

There was a really warm, homey vibe working with AL and the team in-person that transcended the professional relationship. This intangible most clear during our scouting and tasting trips, where we felt much more like a group of friends visiting than clients.

Strength: Vendor network

AL introduced us to several incredible vendors that we would not have found otherwise. Through him we found great photo, DJ, florals, and more. Many of these vendors had not yet “blown up” so were not incredibly expensive. A few of our amazing vendors:

Strength: Grace

AL’s cousin Grace happens to live in Cabo and helped in countless ways throughout wedding planning. As our presence on the ground, Grace brought incredible wisdom and lightness to the process, and we came to know her and her family personally. Grace is a gem and forever a special piece of our wedding.


Weakness: Client communication

Communication with the AL team was a continuous challenge from the start. Some of this I attribute to how business is done in Mexico (casual, informal), but most is how we repeatedly felt as clients.

Ninety-five percent of communication with the AL team was done over a single WhatsApp thread. In other words, a very long and unstructured group chat. This naturally led to gaps and missed connections. It surprised us that our main point of contact would be Diego, a coordinator on the team who did the vast majority of the actual work. We came to love Diego, but it was clear he was overloaded working several weddings at once.

Specific communication challenges with the AL team included not having a clear process up front, promises that were not kept, and a general absence of energy driving the process forward. As clients we were the proactive, explicit, and clear ones when we wished this could have come from the professionals.

Weakness: Cost management, attention to detail

AL did a very poor job understanding our budget and ensuring that we stayed on track financially. He promised us that we could do things for a certain price, but months later, well into the process when it was too late, told us that those same items would incur significantly more cost.

Six months into the process, AL admitted that he had misunderstood our budget altogether. He had thought that the total budget we gave him (for all events) was the budget for just the wedding day, a wildly unprofessional mistake. As a result, we spent meaningfully more than we set out to. When confronted about this, he reacted defensively and blamed us on a heated Zoom. Also wildly unprofessional. He would later apologize.

Apart from the budget, key spreadsheets were not updated in a timely fashion, a key outfit was left in our Airbnb on the day of, and the reception seating chart was not correct. While none of these issues were catastrophic, they could have been avoided easily with far more care from the AL team.

Weakness: Staffing

We felt that the AL team was understaffed at our wedding. There was an overall strain given the headcount, and we’d have felt more confident if we he had more people on the ground.


We had an ambitious destination wedding, and are grateful for the work that AL and his team did to help us pull it off. They did a fantastic job in several key areas, but with cost management and communication we were left wanting much more. Based on our experience, we’d hesitantly recommend AL to other Indian couples with the big caveats listed above. If some of these key mistakes could be corrected, he and his team would be unstoppable.

· wedding