Reception Send Off - how many guests?

There's no way to predict that. Our band was amazing and everyone stayed till the venue turned the lights up and threw us out. We didn't do any sort of sendoff though. I think it's kind of silly to spend money on that, tbh.

Personally, I would order the 50 necklaces and then the rest of the guests that are still there can use the bracelets. But I'm cheap lol

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This is what I'm leaning towards. For some reason glow bracelets are SUPER cheap, but the necklaces are literally 3-4x the cost. I want some necklaces, though. I can imagine twice the price, but quadrupling it is absurd!

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We're having a live band too, and they have a really great reputation here. I was just asking if others had any input on how many guests would stay until the end. For example, did most of the guests leave by 10pm, did most of them stay, about half, etc.

Thank you for letting me know that most of your guests stayed until they were kicked out. That's the information I was looking for.

I know our venue planned our late night snack assuming that about 60-75% of the original guest count would be there which worked out for us. we probably had about 50 people out of 175 still around when we shut 'er down. we didn't do a send-off though (that's yet another thing i'd never heard of till i joined WW, they're obviously not common where i live!).

I never thought of this, I am not sure how many people will stay till the end with my 11pm sunday sendoff?

Our reception went until midnight, and I would say that about 75% of our 200 guests stayed the whole time. Our live band was a hit (as was the open bar) so people didn't want to leave!

View Quoted Comment This is what I would do as well- not everyone will want a necklace and if someone really wants it like you said they can make one from a bracelet.

Honestly we were supposed to have our sparkler send off at 10:45 for our 11 pm ending and quite a few of our guests started leaving around 9:30-10 so I actually told my wedding planner to move it up and we did it much earlier for photo purposes. Most guests came back inside and started dancing again but a few did leave afterwards. I was more worried about having sparkler send off photos with like 10 people out of our 100 guests. There is no way to predict what time your guests will leave though. We had a few of our bridal party leave before since they had been on the go for so long and were tired, as well as older guests who were tired.

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I totally get wanting to be able to capture the sparklers while everyone was there.

I'm more excited to just have the glow sticks on the dance floor and making sure there's enough for everyone! I'm going to try and just order enough so everyone can have 3-4 bracelet sizes and see what happens

It might depend on your crowd. We are in our 30s and most of our crowd is 30+ with toddler-aged kids, so we ended our reception at 11:00 thinking people would want to leave early. 75% of our guest list was still there at 11:00 and begging for another song. We expected everyone to be exhausted and ready to leave before 11:00 since our wedding was on a Friday night. We also did a glow stick sendoff, and luckily I ordered close to 100. Ours were foam LED glowsticks (like lightsabers almost) and were a huge hit. Lots of our guests took them home for their young kids to play with.

I think send offs are a really good photo opportunity.
We are expecting 126 guests and we purchased 75 sparklers. Some of our guests are older and we know they will most likely leave right after dinner.

Check your local wedding resale page on Facebook. I also don't think there's a good formula but it is a thing I see pretty often so it might cut the cost and make you more comfortable with overbuying. (It's something I'm really conscious of. I just dont want to be wasteful!)

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They may look like a great photo opportunity, but they're very contrived and a pain to organize. You have to coordinate everyone leaving at the same time, lining them up outside, getting the sparklers or glow sticks ready, waiting for instructions from the photographer, and then wait for the couple to come out.

I've only seen this at a wedding once, and it took about a half hour to get us all out of the venue and lined up. People are really tired by then and most just want to go home, not stand around for a photo op in heels.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. All our guests left, and we stayed behind waiting for the DOCs to pack everything up, and to pay the final bill.

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I've seen send offs many, many times and they've always taken less than 10 minutes. I'm sorry your experience was horrible, but it doesn't seem to be the norm.