Table Visits

We didn’t do table visits because we joined our own cocktail hour and greeted everyone then. But I think greeting all your guests at some point is 100% necessary. You mostly just say hi thank you so much for coming! People will tell you that you look beautiful or they cried during your vows or the food is delicious and stuff like that. We mostly smiled and nodded and said thank you then kept moving!

View Quoted Comment Okay, that should be easy enough then, thank you! That makes me feel a lot better. We have an extended cocktail hour and should be there for most of it, so maybe we won't even need to.

Some sort of visit with each of your guests is necessary. Whether you do a receiving line, table visits, or join cocktail hour to greet your guests, some sort of visit is needed. These are very short "thank you for coming" visits. That's all you really have to say. I had my photographer follow my DH and me around for our table visits so we could take a picture with each of our guests and then we included those pics in our thank you cards.

View Quoted Comment Yeah it was really important to me to stay seated for our whole dinner and enjoy it. So we had a welcome party instead of a rehearsal dinner where we were able to get a lot of the small talk out of the way as well as being in our own cocktail hour! So dinner and dancing we were able to completely enjoy.

We are hoping to do a receiving line so we can greet guests that way. We'll still mingle at the reception but it's a sure fire way to hit most of the guests!

One tip I heard is if somebody gets too chatty on you, you can politely interject and say something along the lines of "I would love to discuss this more but we need to get to the other tables before guests leave!"

We did table visits and it wasn’t too bad, we just had a code for getting the other out of a conversation if it was dragging on lol. But I agree with above, you need to greet your guests somehow. For our timeline this was the only option.

Depending on the size of your wedding/# of tables, you won't really have to engage in actual conversation with people. You'll get to a table and they'll all be telling you how beautiful you are/how touching the ceremony was/etc. You and H will respond with a genuine "Thank you! Thanks so much for coming," "We're so glad you could be here!," etc., and it will be time to move on to the next table. Personally, I think table visits are good for two reasons: most importantly, it pretty much guarantees you get to at least greet and thank each guest personally -- without table visits, it's going to be hard to keep track of who you've talked with and who you haven't; the second potential benefit is your photographer can accompany you and H on your visits and get a quick picture of you with the guests at each table -- so you'll also be more likely to have pictures that include every guest. Personally, I think it is important that the B&G attempt to talk, briefly, with as many guests as possible, and table visits are one fairly efficient way to do that. (Daughter and SIL were served their dinner first, and as soon as they were done they started their visits. The guests at one or two tables kind of talked too much/slowed them down, but then the photographer helped move things along and got them back on track. They had 13 tables, and I'd guess they finished in not much more than 30-40 minutes. Guests were busy finishing their dinner. Once they were done, they did the father-daughter & mother-son dances, then the dance floor opened and everyone just danced and partied for the remaining 2.5+ hours. Some of the older/elderly guests left when the dancing started, but daughter knew she'd had a chance to greet everyone, so it was fine.) Good luck!

Totally unplanned but we wound up greeting all our guests immediately after the ceremony. Everyone came up to us as the exited the church. It was unorganized and was definitely not a receiving line.
We also finished pictures early so we got to mingle at cocktail hr for a little bit.

View Quoted Comment Great idea!

Thanks for the advice everyone! Feeling a lot better about this.

It's the easiest and fastest way to make sure you have greeted and thanked every guest. If anyone tried to keep us too long, the other intervened and we got around everyone pretty quickly. It's not essential, but you do have to make sure you greet everyone at some point

I'm currently planning my second wedding.

For my first wedding, we went around to every table so that we could personally thank everyone for coming. This you must do. But all of the conversations were brief. A lot of guests were actually waiting for us to come to them so that they could give us a card/wedding gift personally instead of dropping it in a box.

But, neither one of us got to eat our dinner. We'd have a bite, someone would come over to talk to us, we'd get up to give them a hug, chat for a few minutes, then turn around and our food would be gone. So if you can find a way to greet your guests that doesn't involve going table to table, you should try to do that!

I'm so happy I did table visits! After I finished my main course, and before dessert, I circled the room and chatted a bit with everyone. My wife didn't, and she said she regrets it. You can talk to couples, families, and friend groups at the same time, so it probably won't take as long as you're imagining (unless your wedding is huge). It's easy in the hubbub of the day to miss out on speaking to a lot of people if you don't do this.

View Quoted Comment The food thing is huge for me - I've heard from a ton of people that they didn't eat at their wedding and that's not an option for me. Part of the reason we picked our venue is for their food so I am determined to sit down and eat a meal. We have a long cocktail hour and no dances or planned activities for after dinner so I feel confident time wise we'll be able to visit with everyone and still eat (hopefully).

View Quoted Comment Thanks for the feedback! Good to hear that you're happy you did, I'm thinking we're going to have to. Based on these comments it seems like itll be fairly quick and painless and better to just do it than regret it later.

View Quoted Comment I love this idea. I really want to include photos in our thank you cards! What a great way of ensure you have one of everyone.

I've also been worried about this. We’re going to have a welcome get-together the night before so I'm hoping to greet a lot of guests then and then spend less time ”making the rounds” during the actually wedding. (it's super important to me that we sit down and enjoy the meal).

View Quoted Comment

We wanted to make sure we ate a full dinner too so our dinner service was an hour and half from 6-7:30 p.m. We were served first which gave us plenty of time to enjoy our entire meal before we got up and went around to each table.

View Quoted Comment Did you have your photographer follow you to each table? Or did you and your husband simply go to all of the tables to greet everyone?

We will make table visits. It's also a tradition in my family that the bride&groom get up and thank everyone one more time before they leave for the sendoff

We did this and it was the only time we got to talk to more than half our guests all night! You basically say thanks for coming and they will ask something or say you look great and you move on.... we have 14 tables and it took us about 40 mins to get through them all.