How To Organise Your Wedding Guest List

Last Saturday, we were invited to a wedding and our names were no where to be found in the guest list. Imagine our horror and the embarrassment when the reception had to call up the groom to check if we were the guest.

Could all the hiccups be minimized when drawing up the guest list? Drawing up the guest list is one of the most stressful things if not executed properly. As the saying, too many cooks spoil the broth. Usually the invitations are divided into three groups – the bride and groom, and the bride and groom’s respective families.

After choosing the venue, the parties involved should sit down and draw up the list of who they want to invite, taking into consideration the seating capacity of the venue. You wouldn’t want to squeeze fifty tables into a capacity of thirty and packed your guests like sardines in a can! Usually for first wedding in the family, parents are more excited than the bride and bride groom and want to invite everyone even the ones they don’t know well. It’s like they have somehow missed out on their own wedding and have to crash their children’s wedding.

This inevitably causes problems, as everyone will have conflicting ideas on who should and shouldn’t be invited. Your mother will insist on inviting aunties and uncles you never knew you had, while your father-in-law-to-be will want to invite all his colleagues and business associates. And to top it all off, your fiancé wants to invite his drinking pals. You’ll be left wondering if there will be any room for your friends.

Looking back, we should have put our foot down when it comes to the invited guests. When we planned our wedding our venue had the seating capacity for seventy tables of which forty five tables are guests whom we don’t even know. Even if we were to bump into each other on the street, we wouldn’t even recognize them. That is why it’s important to streamline your guests and invite people who mean most to you and are sincerely happy for you. In the end it really boils down into what kind of wedding celebration you have in mind.

These are a few lessons I have learn after planning for my wedding. Hopefully you can find it useful.

1. Allow yourself plenty of time to plan the guest lists, Do not do it under a time constrain. You’ll be stress out, temper’s will flare and in the end you might not even have a wedding to plan.

2. Have in mind what kind of wedding you want. Is it something small and cozy or big and extravagance? If you have set your heart on a venue, work you guest list around the venue’s seating capacity. Or plan out the number of guests you want to invite and find a place that can accommodate all your guests. No hard and fast rule on this. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

3. However, do take into consideration your budget. Will you be able to afford the cost of the wedding dinner for 100 tables in the event that your red envelopes would not cover? You would not want to start the journey of your marriage saddled with debts. Unless you are the heir of Hilton or one of the children of Sultan, do not plan a wedding that is over your means. One way is to cut back on the guests you are inviting. Quality is better than quantity.

4. Another challenge is deciding on the people you would really want to share the special day. Naturally you are on top of the world and is excited to announce to the world that you are getting married, regardless of whether you actually keep in touch with them or not. You may even feel that you have to invite everyone you know for fear of offending them if you don’t. However, if you barely know each other, they’ll probably understand why they were not invited. They would be relieved too as they would be able to save on the red envelopes.

It’s better to have guest who are genuinely happy for you rather than those who attend for the free food. One of my father-in-law’s business associate asked his staff to attend our wedding on his behalf. In the end this person ended up raiding our free flow bar, gotten drunk and nearly crashed our toasting session! Experiences like this make me wish I could undo the past and redo my wedding.

5. Is it going to be an adult only affair or are children included? If your seating capacity is packed to the maximum, I’ll suggest you leave out the children. If you can afford to fit in a few extra guests, include only those of your very close relatives and friends.

6. Run through and compare the lists that both families and all parties involved have prepared. Check, double check and triple check that no one important has been left out. Make sure the parties involved each have a complete set of the master guest list. In that way you can be sure all invited guest have a place for dinner.

My husband and I once went to a wedding reception where the bride and groom thought that we are in their parents’ guest lists and vice versa. Well, this assumption left us with no seats at the wedding dinner.

7. Organize the seating plan. Make sure you sit people whom they are comfortable with together. Never make the mistake of seating your Great Aunt who has not been on talking terms with your second aunt together. You’ll end up with a scene. And you are definitely not the centre of attention!

8. Arrange your guest lists in alphabetical order, it makes it easier for the reception and usher to show your guests their table.

9. Who pays for the wedding gets to decide? We wanted to pay for our own wedding but one set of parents insists on picking up the tab and keeping the red envelopes. This is a tricky situation and is best settled in the early part of the planning. Give and take wherever is required. I strongly prefer to pay for the wedding myself so that I can control the overall direction of the wedding plan.

As I look back on my wedding, it was the sincere people who made the event what it was. So think about what’s really important to you – what you absolutely have to have, and what you can do without.

Hopefully these sharing can make your guest planning easier for you.