Guest List, A List & B List?

demarcosjd

This might be a silly question but how did you/are you working out your guest list when it comes to sending out invites and timing it so that someone doesn't know they are on a B list?

taccoten

My advice is to only invite the people you 100% want at your wedding and nix the whole "B List" altogether! 

demarcosjd

We would just forget about it all together but the thing is we need to have 150 guests for our location. There are a several out of town relatives and guests that could not show up or all show up. If they all show up that would be fine if a lot of them don't we might be under. We are inviting 185 but recent friends who got married said it woudn't hurt to have a few back ups since we are paying for 150. Just wondering if anyone else has experience with this.

taccoten

Oh that makes sense then.  How many B Listers do you have?  If anyone asked about getting their invitation later than others, you could always pretend like the place you ordered from screwed up and only sent 150 when you ordered 200.  Then say you wanted to at least get the 150 out so you could start getting responses so you could coordinate with your caterer.  haha my advice is to just flat out lie, but it would work!

demarcosjd

Thanks, that's true we could always do that lol. Not a lot but just a few incase we do get several no's this could help get us to the 150. It's only about 14 more people who are mainly from our work. We are hoping we don't have to even worry about this but just as a back up plan.

Northstar1808

I plan on sending my invites out 4 months prior to my wedding and as I get my RSVPs I can get a more realistic number of who is coming and who's not.  If a lot of people decline, then I can send out the invites to my B listers about 2 months prior and they won't even know since 2 months is when you're supposed to send it.

PharmJen

Personally I'm not a fan of the B list, but understand that people have valid reasons for doing it.  If you don't have a maximum for your venue, why not just invite them anyway, especially if it's "only" 14 people?  Our minimum is 175 and we've got about 215-220 invited. 

Most likely, people will know when they've been B listed unless you send out invites incredibly early, as pp said.  We got an invite 4 weeks before a wedding and the hotel block had already expired.  She had a MAX number of people she could put in the room so I understood but I still felt a bit slighted. 

miguelhilary2010

Can you negotiate with your venue/caterer for perks if you come under the minimum?  That's what I plan to do.  We are really reaching to meet the minimum (mom's fault, but I wont go there), but instead of inviting people we really dont want/need there, we will be able to upgrade some of our food options if we have less.

I didnt start a B list because I dont want coworkers or acquaintences there that I'm not close with.  When I look back at pictures in 20 years, the only people I shouldn't know/recognize are the "and guest" people  

demarcosjd

Thanks for the feedback, we will figure something out. Hopefully we wont even have to worry about it and it will just be an incase situation. Unfortunately we cannot negotiate for a lower head count. We did ask and there is nothing they will do for a Saturday night in prime wedding season.

miguelhilary2010

I didn't mean negotiate a lower head count, I meant negotiate food    For example, if you come in 20ppl under your minimum, instead of you wasting that money on nothing, can you add shrimp to your cocktail hour, or upgrade to top shelf liquor at no additional cost, etc.  They set the head count so they make x amount of dollars off the night.  If they don't have to provide meals, they can sometimes use that money in a different way.

Summer2008

We had a second set of reply cards printed for our b-list invites. Also, people one our b-list were from different social circles than all a-list invites (mostly co-workers). Our room held 100-150 people with 100 our min to pay for. For budget reasons we were aiming for as close to 100 as possible. We ended up with exactly that.