Wedding Guests: who to invite? (Part 2)

Here are a couple of handy hints:

1. Only invite couples who live together or who are married. Eliminate the “plus one guest” unless you actually know the name of the guest.

2. Invite people whom you want to be a part of your future together, not necessarily people who were part of your past, which is to say, new friends may have more of a place at your wedding than some of your university friends, whom you may feel a vague obligation to invite.

All of this means that deciding on your guest list is one of the first - and most important - things you should do in planning your wedding, as this number is the single most important controllable factor in your wedding budget. Let’s say you’ve run the numbers and you want to invite roughly 90 people (thirty friends, thirty for the Groom’s family, and thirty for the Bride’s family).

Now bear in mind that it is highly unlikely that everyone you invite to your wedding will say yes. As a rule of thumb, approximately 20% of people you invite will politely decline, for one reason or another. The key to getting to the Magic Number of guests you want to be at your wedding is to successfully identify and remove from the list the people who cannot make it as early as possible in the whole process.

Let’s assume that dear old uncle Frank should be invited (he is family, after all) but you don’t really know him and he lives abroad, so he’s highly unlikely to come and you personally would not be too upset if he didn’t make it. You’d rather invite Dan, a guy you use to work with. But the family expects that you send Frank one of your precious invites! What do you do?

Answer: remove Frank from the list early by sending out Save The Date cards as soon as you’ve booked the venue! Save The Date cards are becoming increasingly more popular in the UK. They give information on the date and the venue. Once you have sent them out, you can follow up with the people who you suspect will not be able to make it. So you can call up uncle Frank once he has received his Save The Date card and get a confirmation from him that he will not make it (as you expected). You express regret, but now you don’t have to send him an invite. Instead, you can send out a Save The Date card to Dan - the first person on your reserve list.

Another idea is to explicitly state on the Save The Date card that people should let you know if they know now that they will not be able to make it for any reason (although there is no need to say yes for definite at this stage). This could eventually free up some more space from your 90 places from people who may have already booked holidays or who may have other prior engagements.

If you follow this process outlined above, you can increase the number of people who will accept the final invitations (when you send them out) into the high 90 percent range!

 

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