What Actually Happens When You Work With Them
Faggas Funeral Services is a modern end-of-life care provider based in New Orleans that has spent the last few years shifting how families handle death. They focus on personalized memorial planning, green burial options, and digital legacy creation instead of the standard white-glove package most places push. Their approach strips away the theatrical components of traditional funeral homes and replaces them with practical planning tools, straightforward pricing, and flexibility for non-traditional families. It works well when you actually need it. Most funeral homes operate on a fixed menu: viewing, casket, grave, flowers, hearse. Faggas flips that structure. They start with a consultation that maps out what the deceased would have actually wanted, then builds a plan around those preferences rather than pushing add-ons.
The process breaks down into three phases: Phase one is the family conference. You meet with a planner who goes through the details — venue preference, music, readings, body disposition, whether there's going to be a celebration or a quiet scattering. This meeting usually runs 60 to 90 minutes. No rush. Phase two is logistics. They handle permits, transportation, death certificates, and coordination with cemeteries or crematories. This is where most families get overwhelmed, and where their service actually saves time.
Phase three is the event itself. Whether it's a full service or a simple gathering, they manage everything on site so the family isn't juggling vendors during an emotional moment.
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Pricing — What You Actually Pay
This is where they differentiate most clearly. Traditional funeral homes in the US average between $7,000 and $12,000 for a basic service with viewing and burial. Faggas offers tiered packages starting around $3,500 for a direct cremation with memorial coordination, scaling up to about $8,500 for a full traditional service. The key thing they do differently is they don't inflate the merchandise markup. Caskets, urns, and vaults are listed at or near wholesale cost. You pick what you want from their catalog or bring your own. They take a flat service fee on top. I ran into a situation last year where a client wanted a custom pine casket made by a local woodworker. The funeral home would have charged a $4,000 markup on a $600 casket. Faggas accepted the custom piece with no hassle and just billed the standard coordination fee. That's the model.
Green Burial Options
Their most distinctive offering is the green burial program. They partner with two conservation burial grounds in Louisiana where bodies are interred in biodegradable shrouds or caskets without embalming chemicals, concrete vaults, or permanent headstones. The markers are native stones or GPS coordinates. This costs roughly 30 to 40 percent less than conventional burial because you eliminate the casket, vault, and embalming. It also cuts the timeline. A green burial can happen within 48 hours of death if the family is ready. The catch is location. The conservation sites are about 90 minutes outside New Orleans. If the family needs the service close to the city, you're looking at a cremation followed by a scattering or a small memorial, not an actual ground burial. Worth knowing before you commit.
Digital Legacy and Memorial Tools
They build permanent memorial websites for each client, including photo archives, video tributes, and a guest book section where people can leave messages. These stay hosted indefinitely at no additional cost after the service. They also offer a QR code system for physical memorials. Families get a small bronze or stone plaque they can place at a gravesite or scattering point. When someone scans the code, it pulls up the memorial page. It sounds gimmicky until you're at a graveside and three cousins show up who live in Ohio and couldn't make it in person. Then it's genuinely useful.
What Falls Apart
They're not a full-service solution for every situation. The main gap is that they don't provide embalming or traditional body preparation for viewings. If a family insists on an open-casket viewing with a body that's been at home for several days, you need to coordinate with a separate prep facility. They can arrange it, but it adds cost and delays the timeline by a day or two. Another limitation is volume. They operate with a small team and cap their intake at about twelve cases per month. If multiple deaths hit in the same week, scheduling gets tight. I've seen this happen during flu season when the family of one client was pushed back four days because another case had priority. Insurance reimbursement is also inconsistent. Their services are generally covered under standard funeral insurance or pre-need policies, but the green burial option sometimes falls into a gray area with providers who still only recognize traditional burial codes. One of my clients had to appeal a denied claim because the adjuster didn't understand the conservation burial category. It took six weeks and two phone calls to resolve.
When to Choose Them Over a Traditional Home
Choose Faggas if the family wants transparency in pricing, flexibility in format, or a non-traditional approach to disposal. Choose them if the deceased was environmentally conscious or if the family is spread across multiple states and needs a coordinated virtual memorial component. Don't choose them if you need a formal viewing with embalming, a large seated ceremony in a traditional chapel, or same-week scheduling during a busy period. In those cases, a conventional funeral home will serve you better.
Getting Started
Call their New Orleans office and request a consultation. Bring any written wishes the deceased may have left, even if they're just notes or emails. The planner will ask about them and the information shapes the entire plan. Come with a rough budget range so they can propose realistic options instead of showing you everything available. Decide on disposition before you book the consultation. Knowing whether you want cremation, green burial, or traditional interment will cut the planning timeline significantly. Without that decision, the first meeting mostly circles the same questions for twenty minutes. Their booking page is straightforward. You fill out the initial form, pick a time slot, and receive a confirmation with a checklist of documents to bring — death certificate, ID, insurance info if applicable, and any pre-need contract if the deceased pre-arranged anything. Everything else they figure out together.
I've watched this process work cleanly for straightforward cases and fall apart for complicated ones where families couldn't agree on the method of disposition. The disagreement isn't about money. It's usually about religion or cultural tradition. Faggas handles it by separating the decisions into layers and letting each side of the family handle their own portion, but that requires a level of communication that doesn't always exist in the first weeks after a death. If the family is already fractured, the planning stage will reflect that.
