How to Make a Seating Plan For Your Wedding Dinner

Video Transcript

"So you've planned all the details to your wedding, and you've gotten all your RSVPs back and you're trying to develop a seating plan for your wedding dinner. Hi I'm Jessica Meiczinger, and I'm going to tell you the steps and what to do in planning your seating arrangements for your wedding dinner. First of all, you want to be familiar with the venue. Go ahead and get a blank floor plan or pre-arranged floor plan from the catering manager at the venue or the caterer or the facility manager if you're having it not at a hotel. Also you want to go through all your wedding invitations and RSVPs and make sure everybody's accounted for. You definitely don't want to leave somebody out. And then you'll want to go ahead and start you know grouping the people that know each other you know family members, friends, you know bride side, groom side. And start you know setting your tables out. When doing your floor plan, you want to make sure the family tables are the closest to the head table, which are the two closest tables to the top. And then you know branch everybody else out in groups from there. Also keep in mind you know if there's anybody pregnant or with kids, seat them close to the restrooms and kind of away from the entertainment so they have easy access to move throughout the evening. Also you know keep in mind your elderly guests as well. You don't want to seat them too close to the entertainment because they usually don't like the loud noise and want to just kind of sit back and relax and enjoy themselves and talk amongst their peers. When you do the grouping, you want to go ahead and group them by table. Here we've done a little chart. It demonstrates the names of who's sitting at that table, the name or number of that table, and also what the guest is having. And you know sometimes you might have a guest that has special dietary needs or is having something different than all the rest of the guests. So you want to make notations on this you know seating chart as well. Once you've done that, you want to go ahead and print your place cards and make a copy of the seating chart and the floor plan and give those to your wedding coordinator, also the banquet staff, your catering manager as well so that way they can ensure smooth dinner service throughout the evening at your reception. So again I'm Jessica Meiczinger with Simply Divine Events and good luck in arranging your seating plan."