Guest list concerns!!! Need advice!!!

[Cruisecrazy25]

My fiancé and I are considering a cruise wedding on Carnival!! I am sold except for one detail!!! The guest list!!!!!! I don't think a lot of my family will sail with us but I have a large family! How did you handle the 50 no sailing guest limit? I was thinking maybe offering the sailing to everyone and just keeping the no sailing guests for grandparents etc. but then if I end up with extra spots I don't want to have someone feel like they were second etc!!! Hope I a making sense I'm just concerned and need advice!!!!

[jul1221]

We had similar concerns with our wedding too. Here's how you solve this problem. It's a little involved but well worth it.

 

First, throw the cruise wedding idea out there to all of the people who you would normally invite to your wedding and see what kind of response you get. You will have a bunch of people say that it's such a great idea and they would love to cruise. Half of those people who say they will cruise actually won't.

 

Now make a list of everyone that you want to invite, number 1-50 of people who are most important. Talk to those people first. Explain to them that you are limited on non-sailing guests and you need to know if they would cruise. Once you reach number 50 on your non-sailing guest list it's easy to figure out the rest of your guest list.

 

Believe it or not, this is the hardest part of the entire wedding. The rest is all cake and flowers.

[dcdiva]

Jul has good advice and a very good plan. I am afraid we took the cowardly approach and eliminated non-sailing guests from the mix. Our wedding was at the first port on our cruise -- so only those who sailed with us could come. We still invited nearly everyone we normally would have including a huge number of family and friends. But we fully expected that only immediate family and few other very close friends would actually come. To our surprise, 60 friends and family came along for the cruise.

[HeatherC430]

We narrowed our guest list down to immediate family, those extended family members we thought might come & friends. We sent out approximately 100 invitations and only had about 30 guests total. We do not live close to the port, if we had, we may have taken a different approach.

[maychild20]

We mailed out invitations for 250 people max (which includes any possible +1's), most of which went to my dad's side of the family where I have 55+ "close" cousins.

 

We decided to make things simple for us and NOT book an embarkation wedding. Either they are committed and will sail with us, or they are not. I didn't want to deal with the hassle of non-sailing guests.

 

In the end, we have 22 guests book cruises to watch us exchange vows later this month. No one on my dad's side is coming (oh well, I sort of figured it would be this way).

 

It is what it is, and I'm INCREDIBLY happy with the guest size. Having very close friends and family come support us, and make those time and money sacrifices is the way I wanted it to be. It is a happy medium between eloping (spending barely any $) and having a huge local wedding (spending the money we are now putting towards a house down-payment).

 

Good luck with your decision-making! I honestly thought the invitations part of the planning was the most difficult of it all. Once you're over that hump, it should get easier! :)

[Lil_One]

Living so close to several ports, we also decided to throw the embarkation day wedding out the window! We decided to book a shorter cruise so it would be a little more affordable for our guests. We will be married while in port at Cozumel. We already have 30 people booked after sending the save the dates!

[Cruisecrazy25]

Thanks everyone!!! If we go with the cruise wedding I am now tempted to not have it on embarkation day!! :)

[keltpa]

That's a great approach! We live in Florida, but my husband's family are all out of state (NY and WA) and mine are mostly in the UK, so I knew the only people we had to worry about were friends. We had an embarkation day wedding, but at a port 2 hours away from home on a Thursday. Realistically, not many people opted to take a Thursday off work to drive across the state in time to board at 10am and be on their way home by 3pm. They have to be a pretty good friend to do that when they aren't even going on the wedding cruise for whatever reason ;) You could also let people know there is limited availability for non-sailing guests. It gives extra incentive to book early rather than having people commit then not show up.