How on earth do you work out your guest numbers??

Hi

We are trying to work out our guest numbers and I'm really struggling how you work this out until people actually reply to invites!

We have approx 100 people that we are inviting for the day, but at least 20 of those are in Australia & South Africa & so I don't think they will be able to attend. We then have another 20 or so that we want to invite for the evening. I'm not so fussed about evening guests, but how do you give a venue an idea of numbers if you have invited 100 people but there is a good chance only 70 will come?

Thanks!!

Hiya

Have you booked your venue yet? Before we booked ours and before we even started looking at venues, we did a provisional guest list to get an idea how many guests we would have. Your venue will not need to know definite numbers until maybe 8 weeks before when you meet with them to decide on the menu options.

Hope this helps a little.

x

Hiya hun, when you book your venue give them the lowest number, so say we will have 70 but maybe more if you need to give numbers that early and then closer to the date they will ask for final numbers etc but that will be once you've sent out your invites etc. We gave a number to our venue which is our minimum which we will have to pay for. We've invited more and when we go in to our final meeting with them we will let them know exactly how many are coming and will have to pay for that amount. If you state you're having 100 then they may do that as your 'minimum' and you would have to pay for that many regardless so just say the amount you know you can get and any extra will be a bonus. Hope that helps, sorry if it makes no sense! xx

Hi,

Thanks to both of you for your replies - that makes a lot of sense. We haven't booked our venue yet, starting to look around now, and it was great to know what to say to them and know to ask if they would charge if numbers drop, when we had to tell them by etc!

Thank you!

it may pay to put out save the dates and ask for anyone who you aint sure of coming to let you know as soon as possible. this means that you would be able to let your venue know as soon as you do. im guessing they will only need to know nos for catering?

x

The usual rule of thumb is to say that between ten and fifteen percent of your invitees will not make it to the wedding. For your SA and Australia guests I would say that only 50% will attend, unless they are immediate family.

Hi we wrote down everyone that we would invite. We then looked at venues that would hold this number or less, our venue has minimum of 50 for the room we booked. But can hold up to 100 in day we have 85 currently but know we can drop some and be ok

have booked my venue they have told us when we looked round that we had to have a minimum of 100 adults, but realised when looking at small print that 12 years plus is an adult. They have not asked for numbers but did ask rough number but nothing to write down just an idea so they can give you a view of how things will look, so dont worry when you view thye will tell you minimum but you do not have to tell them a number.