The Bride comes from a huge Italian family, and she's had to fight to limit her guest list because her dad would like for it to be over 300 guests. I wonder how many people one must invite to end up with a party of 300 people?
We've been in the process of finalizing our own guest list, as we're nearing time to distribute invitations (eeeep!), and we're completely at a loss for anticipating the actual attendance vs. the amount of people we invite. It's generally a leap of faith, it seems.
We're hoping to keep the head count to 105, per our arrangement with The Bungalow Club. Family is all included by default, but deciding who to invite and who to leave off among friends is a decidedly un-fun yet sadly necessary part of wedding planning. Right now our invite list consists of about 180 folks. I'd heard tell of creating a 'likelihood to attend report', in which you rate each guest's likelihood to attend by assigning them a percentage, and then you average those percentages out by dividing by the number of invitees. When we tried, it said we can expect a 60% attendance rate, probably due to the large amount of out-of-town guests on our list. Hmmm. We may need to invite more people, yo!
So, we've started a "stand-by list" of friends we'd love to have come, but for one reason or another didn't make the initial "boarding pass list". Not that we love them any less, but a contingency plan seems to be in order considering that if we fall under 105 guests, we still have to pay for them. Better to have seats filled than empty, right?
How did you evaluate your guest list? Were you surprised by the number of RSVP's? How so?
Posts
7 comments:
We're inviting 115 people, and our reception has room for 110. We honestly figure we'll have at least 95% attendance. Most people are local, but more than that, with just over 100 people, these are only our family (about half the list) and close friends. We've been planning for over a year, so our close friends already have an idea they'll be invited.
I'll let you know how it turns out!
The RSVP stuff that got pulled on us still makes me angry.
We had about 60% RSVP yes but to pour salt in the wound 30 people just decided the day of to not show up, never sent a card or anything. So we wasted a bunch of money on people who just couldn't bother with it.
Moral of the story, there is no way to predict what people will do sadly.
I've heard from many sources you should expect roughly 20% off your guest list NOT to attend. For us, we think that's going to be pretty accurate. That would put you at 144 people, though...well over 105! But you know your guests better and their likelihood of attending.
I think a "stand by" list can be necessary sometimes. Surely, no one really thinks of their friends as on the "B" team, but sometimes it can be a blessing in disguise when people RSVP "no", because you get to invite others!
scaling back our guest list was the hardest part of planning our wedding. we made choices based on whether or not we'd spent time together with the prospective guest (we've been together for 3 years) and whether we expected to that person to be involved in our lives after the wedding. so a lot of sentimental college buddies were chopped from the list, and I chopped at least half of my mom's friends (the people I didn't know - this remains a source of stress between us). we haven't reached the rsvp stage yet but since we cut it so close to the bone we expect most to be there, but who knows! good luck
I had 30 people (out of 150) not respond. Out of those that responded that they would come, 6 of them were no-shows (fun!). Good luck w/ the planning - take it all in stride.
Post a Comment