Taking Care of Your Wedding Guests

It is so easy to get swept away in your own wants and needs when planning your wedding. And why not, it is after all, YOUR day. We’ve said before, a wedding day and a marriage is bigger than two people and but also about the people who support it.

More often than not wedding guests are more than happy to go to the time and expense that is an inevitable feature with weddings, but it does no harm to show a little appreciation to them in this regard. It’s also what makes certain wedding days particularly memorable. Here are a few things to consider in relation to your guests and how their experience of your unique wedding might be improved upon:

Well Watered

Quite literally, as well as keeping the wine flowing, it’s prudent to remind your caterers get their team to keep topping up the water as well! This often gets missed at weddings and if you think that the champagne may appear as early as 11am and the bar is still open at 1am, that’s an awful lot of alcohol to get carried away on. Spare some sore heads and embarrassing behaviour and keep your guests well hydrated.

Well Fed

In the same vein this will aid against inappropriate behaviour from excessive alcohol consumption. But without that, weddings are more often than not a long day of standing, waiting, travelling, etc etc. Consider the gaps between opportunities to feed. Assume that your guests ate breakfast at 9am, by 12noon they could be pretty hungry again, so keep the canopies coming. If you anticipate a particularly long wait between ceremony and dinner, how about tea and cake after the ceremony? You could even ask your guests to contribute to the cake table as a pseudo bake-off challenge!

Well Entertained

Can you see how these items all tie in together? On the same lines of weddings usually being a long day for everyone concerned, eating and drinking and photographs are all very well, but there are hundreds of innovative companies that offer a variety of ‘entertainment’ for wedding days. I’m not talking about your average magician, but bouncy castles, ice-cream vans, even acrobatics! In our opinion, this is a worthwhile investment, and once again makes your wedding all the more unique and memorable.

Well Rested

With all the fun and games and eating and drinking and photographs and travel and, and, and… One wouldn’t blame your guests for peaking in their energy at about 3pm. It’s a bit of a taboo, but why not consider a very early wedding (for instance, 11am) then offer a slot of 2-3 hours for your guests to return to their hotels to rest? Or why not ask your venue if there can be an allocated room for a bit of ‘time out’. Ask around your friends for beanbags and cushions and throw them all in one place. You’re likely to find a burnt out best man asleep in there at some point, but better that than guests defecting before the party is over.