Our wedding coordinator quit and the replacement wants us to start the plan again

Our venue coordinator left her job five weeks before our wedding.

The new coordinator introduced herself by asking us to resend everything.

Everything is not a small category.

We have spent nine months building a timeline, floor plan, vendor list, rain plan and a collection of email approvals that now feels like an archaeological site. Our original coordinator, Tessa, knew why the family tables could not be adjacent and which door the band needed.

The new coordinator, Mark, knows none of it.

That is not his fault. He joined the venue this month and inherited several events. He sent a checklist and asked us to confirm the basic details by Friday.

The checklist uses different language from the documents we completed with Tessa. “Ceremony setup” is one box. Our ceremony setup required three calls.

My fiancé thinks we should answer every question and treat the process as a useful audit. If our plan cannot survive being explained to a new person, it may not be clear enough.

I hear the wisdom. I also hear nine months of unpaid work being returned to us for grading.

The first warning came during our call. Mark said cocktail hour would happen in the lobby. We reserved the terrace. When I corrected him, he searched his notes and said, “I’ll have to verify that.”

I sent the signed addendum while we were still speaking.

Then he asked whether we had arranged the ceremony chairs. Tessa confirmed in writing that venue staff would handle them.

Again, I sent the email.

By the end of the call, I felt less like a client and more like opposing counsel.

Mark remained polite. He thanked me for every document and did not argue. The problem is that I no longer know which agreements live in the venue’s system and which live only in my inbox.

My mother wants us to request a meeting with the manager. She believes the venue should rebuild the plan from its records rather than asking us to prove each decision.

My fiancé worries escalation will damage our relationship with the person running the day.

We could create one final master document with every confirmed detail and attach the supporting emails. That would take several hours but might lower the risk of surprises.

I resent needing it and want it desperately.

Mark has suggested a full walkthrough next week. He says we can verify the room, routes and timeline together. That is the right offer. I am worried the meeting will reveal more missing information close enough to the wedding that every correction feels urgent.

We cannot restore Tessa. We need to decide whether to approach Mark as a partner who inherited a messy handoff or as a representative of a venue that still owes us the plan we purchased.

Probably both.

Would you build the master document before the walkthrough, ask management to reconstruct the file first or do both in parallel? How do we protect the wedding without making the new coordinator personally responsible for an organizational failure that happened before he arrived?