Have you/would you enjoy attending a wedding weekened with multiple hosted events?

Maybe your close friends and family will be more onboard, but I personally wouldn’t be a fan of socializing with strangers for an entire weekend. The rehearsal dinner and wedding would be plenty enough for me.

Maybe you can do a welcome brunch. Most of your guests will likely want to venture out on their own if they have not been to wine country. I'm assuming by wine country you mean the Napa Valley? I live about an hour away and there are a lot of different sights to see.

I would just worry that if you spend the whole weekend at events with ALL your guests, the wedding won’t even be special anymore because it’ll just be another event with the same people. Maybe just invite family and/or close friends to the other events?

My suggestion would be to tell your guests that all events are optional. But then announce where you'll be and what things you'll be doing. Also, provide other ideas. So give them a list of say 6 things - all optional and then put a note under the ones you'll be doing at what time and when.

Your list would look like this, but longer (see where I noted the bride and groom's plans):

St. Louis Arch Tours - Fri/Sat/Mon hours from 10am-7pm.

City Museum - Fri/Sat/Sun hours from noon until midnight.
*See the bride and groom at City Museum on Friday between 8pm and midnight.
Text Groom to locate us if you come to the museum.

St. Louis Zoo - Fri/Sat/ Sun hours open from 8am - sunset.

We kinda did this! We had a semi-destination wedding — 1/2 our guests had to drive 2 hours each way and the other 1/2 had to fly from East coast/mid west (we’re in California). We left all our events completely optional obviously and had a decent attendance rate for most of the events. We had 175 guests at our wedding.


You definitely gotta know your guests— most of our guests are always down to keep going so we knew we’d have a decent amount of people show up for all the events. We had so much fun and a ton of our guests have told us it was the most fun wedding they’ve been to so totally worth it for us!

Here’s what we did:
Thursday: Rehearsal (wedding party only - 28 people); brewery tour (wedding party only); welcome dinner at Stone Brewing (80 people)
Friday: a bunch of the guys went golfing and a bunch of the female guests went to brunch and wine tasting; pool party and cookout back at our place for the late afternoon/night — only around 60 people went to this because it was back around our house which was an hour away from the hotel (we were all staying at and had our block) and venue.
Saturday/Sunday: we had our wedding at the Safari Park so our guest got free entrance for the day and took advantage of it by visiting the morning of the wedding. We provided transportation from the hotel to the venue (30 min drive each way) for our guests staying at the hotel so we shuttled around 110 people + our wedding party to the venue. Our wedding ran from 3:30-9pm at the safari park. We then took everyone back to the hotel’s lakeside restaurant where we hosted a private afterparty from 10pm-1pm for around 130 people.
We were originally planned to do a brunch (at the hotel restaurant again) the morning after, but knew that we would want some alone time so we nixed it. Plus we knew most people would be too hung over and would be busy packing/checking out. We did see a bunch of our guests hanging out and branching though!

That sounds kind of fun to me! maybe you can do some wine tasting event as well

I would! We actually are thinking of doing a mini wedding/vacation whenever we can set a date again. I think it would be neat to offer up some ideas. If you plan on doing a sightseeing tour, then let it be optional. I wouldnt force anyone do partake in every activity planned. But definitely let them know the opportunity is there!

We're having an Indian wedding so of course it's a million days long (just kidding).

Not everyone will attend all events and that's okay but I think inviting everyone to every event is a bit much. The only people who are invited to all events are family and bridal party.

I've been to multiple day weddings in the past and it's exhausting as a guest. Also think about the type of events- most of ours are short 1-2 hour meal events that are more casual. They are also pretty well spaced apart.

View Quoted Comment

This sounds like an unforgettable weekend. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this out. I actually saw your wedding photos on another post. AMAZING!

Did you find that these extra events were affordable? Traditional rehearsal dinners I looked into were like $65-85/pp + alcohol. So I figured we could just do away with that and allocate the budget to more laid back/more us events.

All of my married friends told me to skip the brunch as they were exhausted. The 2 friends that had it didn't even show up.

View Quoted Comment Awww thanks!


I’m not sure what city/state you live in, but we’re in (and held our wedding in) a HCOL area so most of the costs were pretty standard for our area. We had a pretty large budget for our wedding (our total came out to $120k) so the cost of the extra events were minimal in the grand scheme of things.
Our rehearsal dinner for 80 was $12k when all was said and done. We only had a beer and wine open bar for that event since the brewery didn’t serve hard liquor.
We got a great discount for the rounds of golf since my husband is a member of the club. Wine tasting was around $25 per person. One of my bridesmaids actually paid for everyone’s wine tasting before I even got the chance to take out my credit card.
Fortunately, since the pool party was at home, it was fairly inexpensive. We only served beer and wine so no one got too crazy and showed up hungover at our wedding ceremony. We bought most things at Costco and it was around $500-600? We grilled burgers and hot dogs, baked chicken thighs (it’s like $15 for 20 pieces at costco!), got veggie and fruit plates, desserts, etc We also had to buy some additional baking pans for the chicken and that was like $100 (my MIL bought those). We also had to refill the pool’s propane tank which was another $500. Not sure if you’re holding the pool party at home and if you guys have a pool heater, but ours runs off solar and propane but the solar wasn’t heating it fast enough and we needed it since it was February. Lol. Just something to consider if you plan to do a pool party.
Our after party came out to be over $4000 and that included a full open bar, food, and an ice cream truck. I did find out afterwards that a few guests were insisting on paying for their own drinks. 🤷🏻‍♀️
It really was such a fun time though! And I loved being able to spend time with all our guests especially since it’s just not possible to do that with everyone during just the reception. Plus, we rarely see some of our loved ones since they live so far away from us.

We’re having a wedding weekend because we’re having a destination wedding in Mexico. We have a rehearsal dinner (bridal party only), then a welcome cocktail party the next day, the wedding the next day, and on the last day a farewell brunch. Guests can come and do as they please at the other events and have all of the daytime to do their own activities.

As a guest, I wouldn’t want to feel pressured to attend multiple things, so I agree that it should be presented as optional. Having to socialize for multiple things, plan outfits, and possibly spend more money can be a lot. If guests can’t or don’t want to attend, you also don’t want them to feel left out if they have to keep hearing about it later on. That could be really uncomfortable all around for guests who don’t know a lot of other people.
My advice is to know your audience and try to be considerate if people don’t go.

I very recently attended a wedding where they had multiple optional events. It was a DW so people were there one or two weeks taking their vacations and the B&G sent an itinerary and basically said "everyone welcome but no pressure!" However, it was a small guest list (around 20 people? 30 tops.) If it was a group over even 35 or 40 people, we probably would have skipped, but that's just us. We are a very close group so we knew almost everyone at these events and felt comfortable.


Since things were optional and there were many things we wanted to do on our own, we opted to skip some and do others. Also, only 1 event was an all day affair, the rest were usually a few hours. I think that's an important note- how long the events are can definitely contribute to if people join you or not because they may be planning things they want to do, too.
Most importantly, with that many people, if any of the events involve leaving the property you'll have to coordinate with whatever place/company you go to because organizing that many people is difficult. Depending on the size of the property (you said its huge but idk how big exactly) it may feel cramped if everyone or even 80% makes it to the event. I'd just make sure everyone can fit comfortably.

The “welcome” dinner the night before is great. Honestly, if in wine country, I’d love the day of to enjoy a romantic day with my hubby wine tasting. I would just throw some ideas into your wedding website.


Sounds like a fun wedding weekend.