Hello! My wedding is June 21st 2019 (a Friday). Our venue is amazing, but the owners/operators are a little strange. We are supposed to meet in about two weeks, when I'll hand over my list of vendors and the final guest count. I thought it was odd that they wanted a final count two months before the date (seems like the general rule is to RSVP three weeks in advance) but they're a popular, extremely in-demand venue and I didn't want to rock the boat so I didn't bring it up. Because we live in a remote area and the wedding is on a week day, we sent out STDs really early, a month after we got engaged (in December) and sent the invitations out early March with an RSVP deadline of April 7th, which I figured would allow time for any stragglers to come in the mail before we have to meet with the venue. The deadline is in 5 days and we still haven't received responses from over half of the people we invited. I plan to call and check in with everyone who hasn't responded after the deadline has passed, but is this normal? Could the timeline set by our venue be throwing people off? We wanted to keep the guest list small, at about 100 people, but we ended up inviting 177 knowing many wouldn't be able to make the long trip...but only 72 have confirmed they're coming, 12 said they can't make it, and 92 people have yet to say anything! Five of these non-responders are in my own bridal party!! I'm ranting now, but we told our caterer we estimated about 130 and it's in our contract that we can't increase or decrease that number by more than 20%. I'm worried about penalties or them just refusing to cater our reception at all. Do I need to ask my venue for an extension on a getting a final count? Do I break out the B-List? And again - is this low rate of RSVP responses normal??