Questions to Ask Wedding Guests on RSVP
Twenty questions worth putting on a wedding reply card or online RSVP form, covering attendance, names, meal choices, allergies, access needs, travel and seating, with notes on how to word each one so guests answer it.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Will you be joining us?
Why ask it
Put this first and make it a single choice with two options. Cards that open with a blank line invite essays, and a surprising number of guests will write a paragraph without ever saying yes or no.
Please write the name of everyone in your party, exactly as you would like it to appear on a place card.
Why ask it
Without this you get replies signed the Hendersons and no way to know whether that is two people or five. It also settles spelling, preferred names and titles before a calligrapher starts work.
Are you coming to the ceremony, the reception, or both?
Why ask it
Guests invited to everything sometimes attend only part, and they rarely volunteer that. Asking separately protects your ceremony seat count from being inflated and your dinner count from being short.
Please choose a main course for each person in your party.
Why ask it
Per person, not per household, or one choice will arrive for a couple. Caterers need the split by name because the plate has to reach the right chair, and a household-level answer cannot be seated.
Do you have a food allergy or dietary requirement we should pass to the kitchen?
Why ask it
Phrasing it as something you will pass on gets more honest answers than a box marked special requirements, which people leave blank out of politeness. Ask for the specific allergen, since severe and preference need different handling.
Are you bringing children, and how old are they?
Why ask it
Ages decide high chairs, children's portions and whether anyone needs a quiet room. Asking for ages also resolves the awkward case of a guest assuming an invitation extended to their teenagers when it did not.
Does anyone in your party need step-free access, a seat near the front, or help hearing the ceremony?
Why ask it
Naming the specific needs gets answers that the word accessibility does not. Older guests in particular will mention a hearing difficulty when asked plainly and will never tick a box labelled disability.
What is the best email address and mobile number to reach you on?
Why ask it
The address on the envelope came from a list that may be years old. You will need a working number for the one guest who is lost on the day, and that is not the moment to be searching an old spreadsheet.
Will you need somewhere to stay the night before or the night of the wedding?
Why ask it
Room blocks expire and out-of-town guests book late. Splitting the two nights matters because the numbers are usually different, and the night-before figure tells you who will be around for any informal gathering.
How are you planning to travel to the venue?
Why ask it
The count of guests driving decides whether parking is adequate, and the count arriving by train tells you whether a shuttle is worth arranging. Both are hard to fix once the answers are in.
Would you like a taxi booked for the end of the night?
Why ask it
Rural venues run out of cars at midnight. Collecting this in advance lets you book in blocks, and it quietly reduces the number of guests who decide to drive after all.
Will you be joining us for drinks the evening before?
Why ask it
Pre-wedding events get planned on guesswork and then over- or under-cater badly. Asking on the same card as the main reply gets a far higher response rate than a separate message later.
Will you be at the gathering the morning after?
Why ask it
This is the event guests most often say yes to and then skip. Ask anyway, but treat the number as optimistic and confirm it in the final week.
Is there someone you would especially like to be seated near?
Why ask it
Most guests name one person, which is easy to honour and makes the table plan noticeably better. It also surfaces the guest who knows nobody, which is the single most useful thing to learn before you seat the room.
Is there a song that will get you onto the dance floor?
Why ask it
It is the one question on the card guests enjoy answering, so it lifts the response rate on everything else. Give the band the list rather than the promise: requests collected and never used are worse than not asking.
Would you rather we contacted you by email, text, or post?
Why ask it
Mixed-age guest lists split cleanly here, and the split determines how you send directions and timing updates. Ignoring it means the relatives who need the information most are the ones who never receive it.
Is there anything about the day you are unsure of that we can answer now?
Why ask it
Guests worry about dress code, timing and whether children are welcome, and they ask each other rather than you. Collecting the questions early lets you answer them once, for everyone, on a website or in a note.
Is there anything else we should know so that the day works for you?
Why ask it
Deliberately open, and placed near the end. This is where you learn about the guest who cannot stand for long, the one who is newly sober, and the two relatives who should not share a table.
Would you like to write us a message to read on the morning of the wedding?
Why ask it
Optional, and worth including because the replies are the part of the RSVP pile you will keep. Keep the space small: a large blank box makes people feel they have to perform.
If you cannot make it, would you still like to see the photographs afterwards?
Why ask it
The only question on the card aimed at the guests who decline. It gives a warm ending to a no, and it produces a short list of people worth sending something to rather than a vague intention to do so.
Designing an RSVP that actually gets answered
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to lay it out
Number the guests, do not trust the household
Print the names of the people invited, or give each envelope a code, and ask for a reply per person. The single largest source of headcount error is a card returned for the Smiths when the invitation covered four.
Put a date on it and make it early
Caterers usually want final numbers two to three weeks out, so set the RSVP deadline four to five weeks before that. The gap is not padding; it is the time you will spend chasing the last fifteen percent.
Keep the card to the things you cannot get later
Attendance, names, meal choice, allergies and access have to be on the reply. Songs, seating preferences and travel can live on a wedding website, where you can edit them and where nobody has to write small.
Offer one online route and one paper route
An online form validates itself and saves you rekeying, but a portion of any guest list will not use it. Running both, with the same questions in the same order, avoids two incompatible sets of answers.
Leave less space than feels generous
A short line gets a short answer, which is what you want to transcribe. Large open boxes produce long replies that then have to be interpreted, and interpretation is where the seating plan goes wrong.
What tends to go wrong
Asking anything that reads as a gift prompt
Registry links, contributions and gift preferences do not belong on a reply card, however lightly worded. Put them on the website where a guest can choose to look.
Assuming a blank means no
Blank fields usually mean the guest missed the question, not that they have no allergy or are not coming. Anything unanswered needs a phone call, not an assumption, and the allergy fields especially.
Collecting information you will not use
Every question you ask creates a row someone has to read and act on. If you have no plan for the answers about travel or song requests, leaving them off makes the rest of the card more likely to be completed.
Changing the questions partway through
Adding a meal option or a new event after some cards are back leaves you with two versions of the truth. Decide the full list of questions before anything is printed or the form goes live.
After the deadline
- 1Split the non-responders into people you need for the count and people who will simply arrive. Chase the first group by phone, not by message.
- 2Call rather than write to anyone whose allergy or access field is blank, and record the answer where the caterer will see it.
- 3Build the seating plan only once the plus-one and children answers are settled, or you will build it twice.
- 4Send the confirmed numbers to the caterer with the dietary list attached, then ask them to confirm the figure back to you.
- 5Keep a single master list, in one place, with one person allowed to edit it.