NER - How many declines did you get?

LyannaStark

For the married people, or MOBs or just people who've planned other weddings, inspired by this discussion upthread (downthread?):

How accurate is that "expect 20% to decline" thing? How many No Thank Yous did you get? Were they mostly from people you'd taken out of your secret mental best-guess head count anyway?

Bonus question: How many Yes Pleases did you get from "courtesy" invites you never thought in a million years would actually come? And then presumably thanked the baby Jeebus that you assumed 100% in the first place?

monkeysip

We had a 35% decline rate.  Only 57 out of 88 people are coming.  But from what I hear, that is NOT typical, so don't count on it at all.  Don't even count on 10%.  People may surprise you.

Simply Fated

I know a few brides on here had a 100% yesses. That's why we always suggest planning for 100% attendance. You just never know and why risk it?
At my bf's sister's sweet 16 party a bunch of courtesy invites said yes. That was interesting.


My friend is planning a wedding right now and is going by the 20% rule. She's also assuming a few of hr courtesy invites won't rsvp yes. I'm torn between wanting her to be right for her sake and wanting her to be wrong so she can stop listening to what bridal magazines are spewing out at her.

lyndausvi

18%

On average the events I've work with had an average of 20%.  But that is an just that, an average.  You get yourself in a lot of trouble thinking that is fact.

ETA - I don't remember the percentage, but we had quite of few "never will come" invitees come. An OOT wedding at that.  These people never attend local weddings.  

ally91

I expected 100% yesses just like the regs on here suggested, and I had well over 50% decline. Always expect 100% though!

LyannaStark

I'm pretty much counting on 110%. Guest list isn't entirely final yet but it's already way bigger than I want it, but hey, picking battles. (Picking Battles has so far accounted for like 90% of our wedding planning decisions.)

I'm prepared for goddamn everybody, and it will be fun and awesome and great and wonderful no matter what, but a 35% decline rate sounds lovely right now. 

ETA Our invitations might as well say "Oh my god, an excuse to go to New Orleans PLUS an open bar and free food!" which makes me think we'll probably end up on the "goddamn everybody" end of the spectrum. Mostly just curious how accurate that number is, since I do see it floated around. 

SomethingBeautiful08

We had a close to 40% decline rate, about 150 invited, about 90 actually there.  Most of them were on the "unlikely" list, but a good chunk weren't. 

daria24

We had 92 out of 115. For a Friday night wedding where many guests had a 1-2 hr drive to get there. I really expected a much higher decline rate.

0 of the courtesy invites came, but the only courtesy invites were a family that moved to Brazil to escape their creditors. Soooo....yeah...knew they weren't coming.

EDIT spelling

daveANDkristen

We had about 75% Attend, 25% Decline.  A few people who got courtesty invites did attend, including one from out of state.  Sadly, we also had about a dozen people RSVP Yes and then no-show.  I'll admit I'm bitter about this... not so much as a "congrats" on Facebook from those folks.  You just never know what people are going to do and it's best to be prepared for all outcomes.

LyannaStark

Luckily, I don't think there's anyone I'd be really hurt if they declined. Actually, I'm really scared that people will feel obligated. People are poor and most of them don't live here, so I absolutely understand not wanting to drop a few hundred bucks on plane tickets and hotel rooms just to watch us get married and talk to us for 15 seconds or whatever. And if that means I can host fewer people with better booze, then everybody wins! 

Hope! It's what's for dinner!

ETA @lyndausvi Exactly. There are just so many different kinds of weddings and families, I'm thinking that even if that's the real actual national statistical average, there are a looooot of outliers in there. Sloppy and misleading statistics, Anonymous Random Figure Floating Around. Do a t-test or something, Internet, sheesh.

Gisellerina

@Sleeper2013 - we're expecting a 50% decline, which makes me wish we overinvited too!  But we wanted to budget for 100% acceptance.  But there's so many more family, friends, and co-workers that we wanted to invite. 

We invited 256 - deadline to respond is this Saturday.  So far, we're at a 50% acceptance rate, but we've only heard back from about 20% of our guests, so in theory this could change.

lindanp

We started out thinking 100 guests and based our first budget on that number. After we got the final list together it was nearly 190. We then changed our budget around to accommodate..

We had exactly 100 RSVP. My Dad invited about 12 people 2 weeks before by just telling them when & where (that's a whole other story in itself ) and the actual head count was about 90 at the event.

It worked out for us to budget for the whole guest list because now we have extra money for the honeymoon and paying off our debt.

Hope this helps!

hordol

You can see my invite stats in my signature--I think we are at 23 right now out of 204. I still haven't heard from like, 60-some people though.

I would say 2/3 of our declines are people we already knew couldn't come when we sent the invites, but we sent them anyway to be nice, and 1/3 are people we didn't know if they would say yes or no (and ended up saying no obviously.)

Out of the 60-some we are waiting on, I'm expecting anywhere from 12-18 to be "no", but again, most are people we knew were going to say no from the start because they had already verbally said they didn't think it would work out.

I'm expecting about 170ish when all is said and done. Keep in mind that my percentages may be skewed because of how many people we invited that we already knew were nos before we even sent the invites.

kipnus

We invited 150 guests and had 67 accept, so that's about a 55% decline rate. 85% of our invited guests were from out of town, with about half from out of the country. We were surprised that two of H's aunts made it here from Venezuela and pretty much all of the people my parents asked us to invite (their friends and my great aunts and uncles) did come. Every wedding is different, and it's dangerous to plan off of other people's experiences!

QueerFemme

out of the about 20 "oh, there is NO way they will come" about 15 of them actually showed up.  We had 137 invited, and about 10 "no"s and a handful of the "yes"s didn't show up.

walgrrl

So far, we are at about a 30 percent decline rate. We invited 126 and we have 87 definite yesses. We still have 7 people we haven't heard from, but they live out of state, they've missed the rsvp deadline, and they haven't booked a room at the hotel, so I'm thinking they're not coming. None of our courtesy invites accepted and some people we expected to come also declined. I think our decline rate was the result of the fact that we gave everyone a plus one but many people opted to come solo, out of town guests, and some couples chose not to bring their kids. Our venue gave us a 100 guest minimum so it's a good thing we over invited! Even now, we'll be paying for more people than we have.

Kate61487

We had a 24% decline rate.  There were several people I thought for sure would come that didn't - particularly some of H's family who were local.  A few (my aunt/uncle from FL, my great aunt/uncle from Texas) who came that we never thought would. 

 

Keep in mind we also had a 370 person invite list.  If we'd had a 100 person wedding we probably would have had 100% attendance b/c all of our closer friends/family were there.

NYCMercedes

We had 35% either decline or not even respond. Not respond was the MIL insisting her people were coming when she refused to call them. Ug. Anyway, the bride went OOT for high school, for summer camps, for college, and then for career, too. The groom was OOT for college and beyond. Thus, ALL their guests had a long way to travel, which is why I think we had such a high decline rate.

SKPM

We invited about 220 and had 150 attend, so about 68% attended. But we married near a holiday weekend in July with the vast majority of guests being from OOT, many flying in. (July tends to be expensive to travel, from what I've heard.) The original 220 also included all the single adults with plus-ones, so some of the "declines" were people who declined to bring a +1.

HisGirlFriday13

I am planning on 100% acceptance. If that happens, I will face two problems:

One, I will have more thank-you notes to write (FI's handwriting is terrible, and illegible, so this duty is all on me).

Two, I have to figure out where I am seating about half a dozen people that no one likes, no one gets along with, and were courtesy invites (FI's mother being one of them, actually). I might have a "misfits table," and just put them all there. They won't like each other, but that's less of a problem than seating them with other guests.

Summer2011Bride

Always always count on 100% attendance.

We invited 170ish, and 135 attended. We had a few surprise no's and well as a few surprise yeses.

allispain

27% decline rate (I just did the math now). Some of the declines were a surprise (friends who had said they would definitely be there but financial issues came up) while some of the "yeses" were as well (cousins I haven't seen in over a decade). A lot of the declines were actually local people, and some were also spouses of family members (the husbands of FI's two aunts, who are attending solo). You never can tell how these things will turn out.

avolker1

So far a little less than half have declined. We are pretty much spot on with who we thought would decline thus far. But we have many ca people invited for a nj wedding so we knew from the start we'd have a higher than normal decline rate. I'd love it if we had 100% attendance.

loca4pook

I invited 170 (some were "imaginary" plus ones--I invited ALL single people with a guest) and am ending up with about 110.

Honestly, I kinda stressed and felt bad at first, but I am over it now. Part of my stress was looking at pure numbers..then I realized I had 20 people with guests who weren't dating anyone, so in theory I only truly invited 150 real people, if that makes sense..When I looked at it THAT way, I realized it wasn't so awful.

 

I had some pretty hard, unexpected NO's..one actually made me cry....and a couple unexpected "yes"s

 

Things I learned

1) Don't NOT invite someone because someone else (other than fiance) tells you not to. There was a couple people I would ahve invited but I knew that had conflicts with my friend. In the end, my friend declined and now I look like a jerk to other people who probably would have come

2) When doing "numbers", always assume 100 percent...but also keep in mind that percentages for out of town people are always different then in town..so you could potentially have a little bit more cushion room.

..

 

 

imimbles

I planned on 40% declines based on what I read online (it's about 1000km from my hometown and 700km from his) but we haven't been getting nearly that many. With half of RSVPs back, only 2 people have declined (that represents about 40 people). I would make your plans at about 10-20% declines with the knowledge that that number need some wiggle room in case more people show up than expected.

Starfishj79

We invited 200 in return 140 yes's 50 no's and 10 that I contacted but no reply of if they are coming so 30% declined. Hope this helps!

Maggie0829

We invited 135 and only had 5 no's so if I had planned according to the 20% decline rate rule I would have been royally screwed.

[Deleted User]

We had about a 25% decline rate, but 20% of those were expected (courtesy invites due to my relatives all live in Germany). I had 3 invites that were courtesy that surprised me and RSVP yes.

Swazzle

We invited 167 and 129 RSVPed yes. So, a 23% decline rate for our wedding. We also had 2 no-shows. 

ETA: For the most part, the people we figured wouldn't come, did not. There were quite a few people that we thought would definitely be there that couldn't make it. 

dem068

We are going to have about 5-6% decline,.  That is MUCH less than I was expecting.  All of our courtesy invites said yes already, so I am glad we planned for everyone

LyannaStark

Yes, thanks for the replies. Like I said, I'm planning for 110%, I'm just hoping for more like 75-80%, mostly because I feel like I can be a better hostess if I have fewer guests. Just really mostly curious to hear other people's experiences, very interesting!