RSVP reality
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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. Initially 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. But judging from the amount of “no” RSVP’s we’ve been receiving, due to economic constraints and travel woes, we may need to invite more people, yo!
What’s disappointing us the most is that the majority of the “can’t make it”s are family who we’ll really miss on the big day. But I know they’d be there if they could, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So, we 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?
We just scored a last-minute invite to a local friend’s wedding next week because of that very issue. Half of her family lives in the UK, and wasn’t able to make it. I’m happy that we’ll get to share the Big Day with them… and I suspect we’ll face the same issue later in the summer. We applied percentages to the invite list, and are planning to slightly ‘over invite’ assuming that a lot of the east coast and international guests will less likely to make it.
Oh! We just ran into the same issue! There were alot of out-of-towners that couldn’t make it (due to economy & everything else), so we have more space for people that didn’t get on the A list! The question is tho, will the B list people care they are on the B list? (it’s only a month away!).
On a side note, we were pretty surprised at the # of RSVPs sent back! I don’t think anyone really uses snail mail anymore! ;)
Loopy’s most recent blog post: Hell No! No more Camel Toe!
So I just found your blog, looks like I’m going to be answering old questions in reverse order.
My wedding is in 19 days in Pennsylvania, but we live in Los Angeles. We invited 211, but are now projecting attendance of 100 including us. This is only going down at this point, not up. When we were compiling the save-the-date list, I was really panicked that we’d get 150 years for a space that is more comfortable with 130. I even had visions of 170, heaven forbid. But yes, the economy brought our count way down. No we wish we’d invited a few more people – some of my co-workers & more old high school friends. Mean while no “calculator” out there was going to predict that we would get 46% attendance. I have always kept 2 lists for RSVPs. One for actual RSVPs and one that predicted who would and wouldn’t come. I would tell my mom “Today we’re projecting 106.”
