Wedding Blog
Tomorrow I’m headed home on a whirlwind weekend trip to Chicago for my cousin’s schmancy wedding at the Ritz Carlton! I think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve not been to more than a handful of weddings in my day, and most of them were uber-budgety (and lovely) affairs… so the idea of attending a platinum wedding is very exciting to me.
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 out 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 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 this number by the number of invitees.
When we tried, it said we could 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 yes or no RSVPs? How so?
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I’ve been told by some of my friends who have married within that last year that you can expect about a 75% rate of acceptance, for the most part.
I thought that I would exclude family from that number, as generally family attends, but one of my maids had close family that didn’t attend.
So maybe it’s just all up in the air and my comment doesn’t really help any…
Good luck!
105 people! I am so jealous!
My FH and I are struggling to get our invite list to 350! It has stuck around 400 since we got engaged 10 months ago and it is REALLY close to the time we need to send out invites. AHHH! Unfortunately for us (I sound terrible!), it is a local wedding with only 35 out of town guests invited so we expect almost everyone to attend.
I have no idea how to calculate what and who to invite. I wasn’t planning on inviting my aunts, but my mom insists that I do. However, they are out of town, and my mom didn’t go to my cousins’ weddings because she was out of town so….I’m inviting them and assuming they aren’t coming. But I really have NO IDEA what to expect!
97% of my 110 person list is coming to the wedding. I budgeted for 85% attendance. Oops!!!
I’m a little nervous about this as well. We are inviting 218 people (I just checked) to our destination wedding. So far, we know 70 people who are coming and we don’t want/can’t have much more than 100!!!
Be careful!! We assumed that becuase of the economy, most of our out of town guests would not be attending (airfare, room, food, etc)….and then the reply cards started trickling in. People love weddings, especially in gloomy times. I think it may be safer to factor that 10% won’t show and send out late invitations to the locals based on the declines.
I also had an A and B list and in the end (mostly due to mother nature) a lot of people from out of town couldn’t make it. So we ended up letting people bring their kids (since originally it was no children due to lack of space). It all worked out in the end dispite all my stress and feelings of guilt over who wouldn’t get invited.
I don’t even know the current count of guests we’re inviting, but we’re planning for about 325 to actually come. We actually went through guest by guest and predicted if they are going to come or not. It’s tedious but it’s probably the best way to determine an accurate guest count.
Yea..we’re doing the same. Stand-by list sounds so much nicer than what we are calling it.. A-listers and B-listers.. oops =P
I’m told that in my particular destination wedding site (Tahoe) that attendance is much more like 85%, so we’re not counting on many drop outs. Just make sure you have a pretty good idea of what people are planning before you invite more!
This is the exact topic I need! I’m trying to get my save the date list in order - we’re having a wedding on a holiday weekend near christmas, so we’re not sure if that will increase or decrease the acceptance rates! most people have told us it will decrease to as much as by 30-50% - I guess the safest way would be to invite the number you budgeted for and then add on as they decline?
I invited about 180 persons and 110 showed up and more than 70% were out of town guest. I guess it just depends on your demographics though and the way all of your guest are effected by the economy currently.
We did something I would not recommend - just invited everyone we wanted to and hoped a lot of them wouldn’t show up. It’s working out so far; I’ll let you know how the rest turns out. 
My fiance is in finance, so he jumped at the chance to do a probability report - it’s as simple as you say, assign a probability to each guest (i.e. your MOH is definitely coming, so she gets a 1.0, your second cousin twice removed probably isn’t, so maybe they get a 0.1). Then, at the end, you add it all up and you will have a guess at how many will come. We invited 130, and guessed 80 would come when we did the report. Our final count is 75, so it’s pretty close!
I’d be careful assuming your acceptance rate. All of our guests are from out of town or semi-out of town. Many of our friends are only 2 hours away, but our families are all having to fly in and then drive 1.5 hours. We were guessing that much of our family wouldn’t make it for this reason, but once we sent out our STDs we started hearing from them that they were already booked lodging. I guess they’ll make the long trek for us, and we feel so fortunate! But, it will cut out having a standby guest list.
We invited everyone we wanted to, too! Turns out that is 193 guests on the nose. 103 invitations. Our venue requires we pay for 155 plates of food, so we better have 155 people there as far as I am concerned. I’m thinking we’ll end up with about 170 since it’s in StL and everybody we know is from StL. I think we invited 10 out of towners that won’t come for sure. We have a good idea of who will come and who won’t since the fiance’s sister got married 2 years ago and we stole that Family guest list as ours!
This has by far been my list favorite task of the wedding planning! We just finalized our Save the Date list and decided to go with only those on our A list! We have a B & C list that we will invite if someone off our A list can’t come! Man that sounds horrible, but your right, it’s best to try and plan on a certain number!
I couldn’t bear the thought of A-listers and B-listers…but at the same token we’re inviting 245 and hoping for 160! (”standby” doesn’t soudn so bad)
seem unlikely? 80 of those are from out of town (2200 miles or so out of town) and/or out of the country!
That’s a hug bummer, but everything is so, insanely beautiful!
This website might really help you out with your silver pieces you need. I’m sure someone will always want to buy them off of you after <— (I know I would) http://www.wholesaleflowersandsupplies.com/store/c/836-Silver-Containers.html
Oh, and they make plastic versions by the case: http://www.wholesaleflowersandsupplies.com/store/p/1557-Mint-Julep-Cup-Vase-Small-One-Case-of-36.html
Still working on our list. Our wedding is sort of destination. It’s in my hometown which is about a 2 hr drive for a large number of potential guests. My FI has a large number of further away relatives that are distant relatives that he feels he must invite. I have a big family that is close to one another. Another kicker is our wedding date Halloween and we’re doing no kids due to cost.This is going to get interesting.
Okay — now posting the right follow up — I would just be careful about standby. I wouldn’t want anyone to find out they were on “that list”. But it really sounds like the only solution. Good luck!
We just sent out our Save The Dates, so I hope to hear about people that can’t come in the coming weeks. Most of our guest are local and the likely hood of them coming is high, as long as they don’t already have plans. If we find out a lot of people wont be able to make it that will free up a couple spots, but there are many on our “B” list.
Have fun @ the Schmancy Chicago wedding Miss Meatball, I can’t wait to hear all about it. I assume you will be sharing 
I have to agree with Miss Mascara–guest by guest is what I would do (though we only had 90 people to go through, not 325!!)
It’s rare that RSVPs to a wedding follow a trend–it’s actually a very personal choice to a lot of people, and things like the economy, or the distance or the cost will be of varying levels of importance to people. And don’t feel bad about B-listers….we have a really short B-listers too, and if anyone finds out that they were B-listed and wants to get their knickers in a twist over it, they can just go ahead and not come!
Oh man, I think I’ll be bummed if people we invite decline without any explanations — especially since we’re only inviting about 120…so our wedding could get really tiny really fast!
We made three separate lists - “Definitely would attend” “Maybe” “Most likely no,” to help us count the guests.
We were limited to 100 by our venue contract, and we invited about 130 people. So far, 97 have rsvp’d that they’re coming.
We thought about 75 people would definitely come, and also thought most people on the maybe list wouldn’t. Turns out more people from the maybe list are coming than we expected.
We really wanted to invite more local friends too, and had made a “standby” list, but now we can’t invited any extras cuz we’re at 97.
We’ll have a small BBQ after the wedding for the locals we couldn’t invite to the wedding.
Good luck!
We had quite a few out of town guests as well. We invited 151/guests and we had 115 say yes. 80-85% is what I have heard you should count on.
My FH and I are planning on having a round one and round two invite list as well, since we think most of our families’ guest lists won’t end up attending. I hadn’t ever heard of the percentage method, though. We’ll have to try that!!
@cece21: That’s the exact scenario we have. We have about 150 people on our list, and that is the max that our reception venue will hold, so we actually want some declines because that will give more room for a decent dance floor. LOL “So cut throat, I love it,” said Anthony. (SATC movie :)).
I have budgeted for about 95% acceptance rate. Many people that have received our save the date have already started booking their hotel rooms and we still have 5 months! We have an A and B list. So, the people on the B list will receive invitations closer to the wedding. But, my guest list is nearing the extremely large mark!
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Mrs. Meatball, Hollywood
Age and Occupation: 30, Actor/Writer/Office Maven
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 28, Actor/Writer
Engagement Date: October 7, 2007
Wedding Date: May, 2009
Blogging Since: September 16, 2008
Venue: Private Garden/The Bungalow Club
About Me: I love melty cheese and diet coke almost as much as I love my man. I'm from Chicago, he's from NYC, and we both miss public transit and great pizza. We have an adorable muppet dog called Paco. I'm part hippie with a healthy dash of hip hop superstar, have excessive empathy for animals, and have not one, but two bionic eyes (long story). We're broke and it ain't no joke. It can't stop us from planning the bold and whimsical wedding of our dreams, but we've had to get pretty creative to make it work, yo!
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