Did You Choose/are You Choosing a Welcome Party or Rehearsal Dinner? How was it?

Hi VioletStorme! We had a rehearsal dinner with 40 guests (grandparents, parents, readers/godparents, and bridal party). I loved it just as much as my wedding ❤️ We did an outdoor tent, palms/beachy centerpieces and had a steel drum soloist play. Super chill and great memories 🐟🥂⛵️ We handed out gifts and a few speeches.

We decided to not have either bc of COVID. Most of our loved ones refuse to dine indoors.

We are having a destination wedding with about 35 guests so we are having a welcome dinner in a private room at a restaurant (original plan was for my FH to cook at the Airbnb but their rules against parties ended that). And then we are having a morning after brunch before people head out.

We had a destination wedding with 15 guests. My family hosted a welcome BBQ the night before at their VRBO house. It was a lot of fun. Only 4 pm-8 pm so we could rest up before our big day. Great for guests to mingle before our wedding day.

We will be doing a rehearsal dinner the evening before our wedding, then a thank you/farewell brunch the final day (we are having a destination wedding).

I did rehearsal dinner. I had a ton of out of town guests so a wedding welcome party would have costs so much

We had a rehearsal dinner with our parents, most of our BP (we had some conflicts), and their SOs.

My ILs hosted it (they love to host parties) at their apartment, and we somehow squeezed 20 people (including our photographers, who did our rehearsal as a warm up), into an NYC apartment.

I am planning to do a rehearsal dinner the night before our wedding!

View Quoted Comment Oooh very nice! I'm glad that you enjoyed it and made some wonderful memories

View Quoted Comment Ah, I see. That's understandable considering current circumstances. I'm sure the wedding will be wonderful just the same!

View Quoted Comment Oooh nifty! Sorry the Airbnb didnt work out to plan not many of them seem to allow parties or gatherings but I'm glad you guys were able to get a backup plan sorted out!

View Quoted Comment Oooh I'm glad you guys enjoyed yourselves. We're still deciding what we want to do since we'll be staying relatively local but fo have a fair number of people on our guest list from out of state I hope the big day following was everything you guys wanted and more!

View Quoted Comment That sounds like it will be a lot of fun and I'm sure your guests will love and appreciate it!

View Quoted Comment That's fair. We are expecting probably around 150 people so I'm sure that would get fairly expensive fairly quickly so I completely understand your reasoning.

View Quoted Comment Oof, sorry there were some conflicts the evening before the big day! I hope they were able to be sorted out without too much stress. Not sure how big NYC apartments tend to be but if they're anywhere near as small the ones here tend to be that's definitely impressive!

View Quoted Comment That's most likely what we will wind up doing too depending on what venue we go with.

We'd like to have a Welcome Event, Rehearsal Dinner, and Good-bye Brunch if we can manage it safely. Quite a few of our guests are from out of town so we want to spend a little extra time with them and thank them for coming. I like the idea of private dining but we're considering all options.

View Quoted Comment Oh wow the whole shebang! If you do everything will you have like the welcome party earlier in the morning then do a rehearsal dinner or do like a slightly earlier rehearsal dinner and then have a dessert themed welcome party (I think that's a thing)?

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Our wedding falls on a Sunday evening so I would have the Welcome Event on Friday evening- something casual and fun, the rehearsal dinner on Saturday evening-maybe something semi formal and then maybe a welcome brunch on Monday morning after the wedding. Still playing it by ear but I at least want the Welcome Event in addition to the rehearsal dinner. If Covid wasn't present, I'd have us all go to Dave & Buster's lol. We'll see how things are in October though!

Since we had a semi-destination wedding, most of our guests were from out of town so we did a Welcome Dinner. We hosted it at a pretty nice brewery and had about 90 guests. Before the dinner, we had a brewery tour and tasting for our guests.


We also hosted a bunch of other events that weekend: brunch, golfing, wine tasting, cookout/pool party at our house, and an afterparty after our wedding.