“Rehearsal” dinner and welcome drinks after?

I have a similar situation, I think we are going to give separate notices to those invited for "all paid" versus opening it up.

Stating Welcome Get-Together at Dockside bar (all welcome) - It doesn't imply we are paying or not. So if people are free, they are welcome to join us.

My FH’s friend did this at his wedding last year and just put the open invite on their wedding website. I don’t remember what exactly what they said, something along the lines of “we’ll be hanging out at the hotel bar from 7:30-9pm Thursday night to visit with all our guests.” Most guests were staying at the hotel anyways because about 60% traveled from out of state and most of those in state traveled about an hour to the location.

I like the language Jessica suggested about hanging out and give them a time window to keep it casual. I would suggest, depending on the number of guests you invited and anticipate would come to this happy hour, to give the restaurant a heads up since this will be during peak time and the off chance they might have a side room you could use if it’s lots of people. That happened at my brother’s rehearsal where we went to a Biergarten with about 2 dozen people and the manager let us use their special event space since it was vacant that evening. Again, just an optional idea.

I agree with sending separate invites out for each of those. sounds fun!

View Quoted Comment This sounds good thank you!

The other thing is a few guests have already rsvped or visited website. Do you think they are likely to keep checking the site for the new event? Or should I direct people there again closer to the wedding?

I don’t think I’d send a formal invite for an event I wasn’t hosting/paying for, at the risk of people presuming it’s a hosted event and not expecting to pay their own way. But I think after dinner welcome drinks is a great idea. We skipped a rehearsal/dinner, but did do welcome drinks (and snacks) at the bar near the hotel. We gave the bar a heads up and they reserved some space for us, and we spread the word casually. I : 1. Put it on the website , 2. Spread it by word of mouth to everyone we spoke to (just “if you come into town early, join us for drinks next door! We’ll be out for a while so come whenever”), my parents mentioned it to their people, my MIL mentioned it to her people, we mentioned it to friends, and 3. I did welcome bags for the hotel and printed a note with the info on it, including time and location.


Was not an rsvp situation as we figured people would come and go as they pleased and probably at staggered times given they were traveling in, so we just reserved a few high top bar tables and figured it’d be a bar hang/mingle. It was VERY well attended— haha frankly WAY more people than we were anticipating, whoops. But a lot of fun, and we closed the bar down! (We had crowd sourced when people would be coming to town to get a rough estimate but I think a lot of people ended up just coming in early — summer Friday so I think a lot of people left work early!). Honestly I think everyone who was staying at the hotel made an appearance!

For what it’s worth, I just tracked down the wording from my website, and it was this (with location and time above, printed on the main page) : .

For those coming in on Friday, join us for drinks and snacks after your travels at the lovely [restaurant name]

8-10:30pm.

Super informal, we will have some space and tables by the back bar where people can come and go as they please. We will be ordering grilled pizzas and apps to share. Looking forward to getting to catch up with some of you all before the big day!

I did include a details card with the formal wedding invites that directed people to the website and requested people to check in closer to the wedding for welcome and shuttle info. I’m still not convinced many people ever even went to the website (we did paper rsvps) , but between that, word of mouth, and the welcome bag inserts, word spread very effectively ! If someone has already rsvped via the website, I’d probably just make sure to mention or have someone else mention the welcome drinks to them directly just in case they never check back in .

View Quoted Comment Thanks for this!! I will definitely do something similar.