You’ve decided to have a destination wedding and want to know how many people to invite. If you send 100 invitations, will you end up with a number of guests closer to 10 or 90? Invite too many people, you may go over budget and not have enough space for all of your guests. Invite too few people, you may end up with a sparsely filled venue and wish you had invited more friends and family to share in your joy on your big day.
Although there is no perfect formula for estimating how many guests will attend your destination wedding, we have the next best thing. Try out our destination wedding guest attendance calculator below to get a better idea of how many people you should invite. Leave the math to us!
Guest Calculator for a Destination Wedding
How many guests should I invite to my destination wedding?
Note: The destination wedding guest attendance calculator should not be used if you are planning to hold a wedding in an area where either of you grew up, recently resided, or currently live. For local wedding locations use our traditional wedding guest count estimate calculator to estimate how many guests will attend your wedding.
For destination weddings, the percentage of guests that will attend will vary significantly. We have found that between 35% and 75% of those invited will typically show up for a ceremony or reception. Yes, that’s a really wide range. The reason why it’s not simple to predict a more accurate percentage is that there are huge influencers that impact how many guests will attend.
Location, location, location! Consider that the more difficult it is to travel to the destination you choose, the less people will likely RSVP. If you have a destination wedding in another state rather than another country, a higher percentage of people that you invite will attend. If you make your wedding an international event, travel expenses will be higher for the guests. For destinations abroad, guests will also need to have a valid passport and possibly a travel visa.
Similarly, the number of people you invite has a big impact on what percentage of guests will watch you exchange wedding bands at the altar. The more people that you invite, the lower the percentage of guests will attend the wedding. For example, if you had invited 40 people, then 30 people or 75% may attend. If you had invited 150 people to the same destination, then 75 people or 50% may attend. The number of invitations you send will not only heavily impact what percentage of invited guests attend a destination wedding, it would comparably influence a local wedding.
Creating the ever-so-important guest list for your wedding can become a daunting task. First you should figure out how big of a wedding you want. Of course you will invite your immediate family. Your partner’s mom, dad, brother, and sister being at the wedding is a given. Your closest friends, they’re at the top of your guest list too. What about aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, coworkers, neighbors, and the friends you see less often? Those are all questions for you to decide as a couple.
After you do some research on the destination wedding guest attendance calculator, you should feel better about how many people you should invite to reach the wedding size that you and your partner want.
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