Married friends! Lets talk RSVP rates again.

I wasn't really surprised by the RSVPs -- our declines were mostly my family from Puerto Rico (who I should have known better than to think they might actually make it, but they sounded like they were really getting their ducks in a row...), a couple from OOT who would be about 8 months pregnant at the time and a few co-workers.

But from H's family, my family in town, our closest friends, we had pretty much 100% show rate. We invited 102, paid for 75, expected 71, had 66. Still, we expected about 75 and weren't terribly off, especially since I forgot to count our 3 vendors.

We invited 178 people and 133 people attended, so that's about a 25% decline rate. This was mostly due to that we had our wedding 5 hours away from most of DH's family and friends; got married in my hometown. So we were expecting a bunch of people to decline. I had always hoped for around 150 people and was glad we ended up with the number we did, it worked perfectly in our venue. Had the major people attend, though DH's grandmother was stubborn and would not come even though she was given many options on how to get there, where to stay and how to get home. Oh well. Everyone had a great time at our wedding and I couldn't have been happier.

We had 100% RSVP yes. Although those are our nearest and dearest, except for my SIL who I could strangle even on a good day, our wedding was a DW for the majority of our guests.

We live in DC area, and we had people come in from Europe, Japan, California, Kentucky, Georgia, Michigan, and a few from NJ.

How's that? So every time people say to anticipate a high rate of decline if you have many OOT guests, I just giggle. Like a crazy person.

I wasn't really surprised about our rate. We invited 100 and had 70 guests at our wedding. A lot of the declines were people who I wasn't expecting to come for a variety of reasons, such as cousins who I've never been close to who I didn't expect to bother making the drive (but still had to invite), or older family members with health issues where the invitation was more a "thinking of you gesture" or one of my best friends who was almost 9 months pregnant and her doctor wouldn't let her make the 1.5 hour trip. We did have some surprises of people who declined who were expecting to attend. We also had some last minute (with good reason) cancelations unfortunately.

So I'd say that I wasn't too surprised and it all worked out mostly to what I was expecting.

Thanks for the insight! Because FH and I are from the same hometown and are having our wedding here, I'm almost positive we'll be that fluke case that has all 160 invited guests show up. Praying that a Friday night wedding and the no-kids policy deters a few, but fully prepared to accommodate all 160 of my loud crazy family members and handful of friends. I'm talking to mom tonight about the guest list and what she thinks of machete-ing it, Mrs S style. I've given myself like 10 hours to cool off and I'm still wanting to cut our list significantly. We'll see. Thank goodness no real guest list decisions need to be made until August or so.

I would agree that rather than saying OOT guests are less likely to come, it's more about specific people. For me, it was always a long shot that my PR family would make it, but a no brainer that my best friend in GA would make it, even if she hadn't been a bridesmaid. I think your relationship with people coupled with distance may be a better indicator, if that makes sense... or their history, that's another big indication, I'd think.

Absolutely. Most of the folks I consider myself close to have no problem hopping on the plane and going to a wedding. I did the same for them, which is also why I thought we would go to Hawaii :-) Granted, I wouldn't do it for just anybody, but distance itself isn't such a huge deal in our families and among friends.

I would love a 50% decline rate for our daughters wedding. It has nothing to do with cost. We invited only people we see or speak to OFTEN. By this I mean there is no one on the list we don't talk to or see weekly. The grooms side has about 30 that he does not see but once a year. I would have cut them but it was not my list. The out of country invites are out. Some already RSVP'd yes and have plane ticket purchased already. So time will tell with the USA ones.

We invited 275 with the hopes/thoughts that under 200 would RSVP yes. A lot of them were out of state guests that we didn't expect to make it and other invites that we "had" to send for courtesy reasons. We've got 185 coming and I'll let you know after Saturday how many are no-shows!

Be careful because a few couples from out of state that we didn't expect to attend, RSVP'ed yes and will be attending. You really never know.

We invited 158. We sent our invites out a week ago and already have 50 responses. There are only 2 that have declined so far. I'm hoping this number increases a little as our venue holds 160, but will be pretty tight!

Ahh yay RayRay! It's almost time for RayRay's dayday!

Yayyyy!!! Just almost. I'm working on getting some helpful things together to give to the venue on Thursday

Sorry had to chime in I can't wait for your pics ray ray !!!

We are inviting 225 so I'm curious to see what we get, yet we do have a b list, yikes!!

Our wedding was pretty much a DW for everyone except a few. We invited 120 and ended up having around 75.

We did have to call to get a good amount of our RSVPs though and even then there were a couple problems.

We invited 161 and have and have 119 coming so 23% declined and it was a mix of out of town guest and people in the same state as us.

Anything is possible if you invite them they might come.

Invited about 100 people , that was about 50 invites.

Received all but 2 back. Though most came in the first week and within the last week and 4 days overdue

We invited 61 to our Vegas wedding.

We've had 29 respond so far - 6 declined and 23 accepted. As a numbers person, I am happy to say that calculates to a decline rate of almost exactly 20%.

We were crazy people and invited 220 to our DW. It also was because my family is huge and so is H's. We knew we were not going to get any where near that number, but didn't want to deal with the family drama of not inviting Cousin Tim.

We had 87 people make the trip - which is right about what we expected.

We invited 197 and it looks like we will have about 160 accept (about 80% of responses are in) Tomorrow I will be sending out another 20-30 and I think about half of them will come. So I am at about 20%. 75% of my guests are from NJ, FL or MA and we are getting married in SC.