who to invite?

Who to invite... it's such a tough question with a non-traditional wedding!

At first, we were going to invite EVERYBODY, co-workers, old friends we barely talk to anymore, parent's friends, etc... Then we thought about it, did we honestly want all these people we didn't care to entertain for SEVERAL DAYS in a foreign country with us? The answer was NO! So...we sat down and made a list, and tried to limit the number of Save the Dates to about 50. We ended up sending about 65 formal invitations out, once we added people out of obligation... extended family, etc... We originally budgeted for 60 people to attend.

After the Save the Dates we had a huge response from people saying how excited they were to go. A few months later I asked for people to RSVP on the website and almost nobody RSVPd. A few months after that, we had about 50-60 verbal confirmations. We did end up having close to 50 confirmations, but for different reasons people had to actually cancel plane tix, etc... We even had a couple of cancellations days before the wedding!!

We ended up having 40 guests.

I think you just never know.... we were just going with the attitude of whoever shows up, shows up!

We are trying to keep it to 30-40. Everyone is also excited to come right now but I know things can change in a year. I am going to change our menu a little bit and invite a few more people. Our menu is HUGE and really dont think we need like 6 desserts plus the wedding cake.

We are so confused on this topic. I had thought for sure we would invite about 50-75 guests and count on probably 30 ish comming. But now we have been talking about picking our closest 2 or 3 friends and their significant other for a low key romantic adults only wedding. Ahhhh, this is such a confusing issue.

Hi ladies-

We had a terrible time with this as well. We are having an AHR so we started out by inviting about 110 of our 400 to Cabo and then we started getting phone calls from friends on the fringe who heard and wanted to come. They basically invited themselves which was totally annoying. In the end we invited about 150 and just sent out the extra invites as people approached us.

THEN we started getting verbal RSVPs that indicated about 110 were going to show up and we started to freak out. But fortunately now that the time has come (and gone) for people to commit the $, many dropped off and we are ending up with about 70. I say about 70 because we are 8 weeks out and have 62 confirmed with plane tickets and still have 16 undecided - I figure half will come.

One huge mistake we made was setting the RSVP date too early. We sent our invites 6 months in advance and made the RSVP 4 months in advance. We ended up extending it to 3 months and then 2 months. It is hard to make big financial decisions until you have a good estimate so this has been sooooo very frustrating. And top it off with an FI who refuses to call his friends and check in!

Also for Christa, airlines have their cheapest fares either >6 months or <60 days so that time period in between is tough for people to commit to the fares. They will come back down as it gets closer.

I've been to 2 DW's and one had 30 people and the other had 70. I would say that 70 is borderline unmanageable so I actually wish we had not been pushovers and kept it smaller. Good luck!

It;s so true... so many people are syain gthey're coming now and we're still 7 months out. When the time gets closer I have a feeling a lot more people may not be able to go. But making the RSVP resonse date too early is not something I had considered. I assumed that people would respect it but it's pretty widespread knowledge that they do not. How much time would you recommend? 2 months?