When is it appropriate to change the guest list?

I have seen others sending out a notice of cancellation just to let everyone know the event you were planning is no longer happening. This gives you the ability to create a whole new event, not associated with the old one and you can generate a new guest list.

Treat it like it is a new event. That is what the published etiquette gurus (Emily Post, Miss Manners) have suggested from the beginning of Covid.

I'm curious on this too. My wedding was postponed from July 2020 to July 2022, and I already want to make a few changes to the guest list (though I haven't made any yet). From my understanding, all guests who got a Save The Date for the original event would still need to be invited. But since you sent out cancellation notices instead of postponement notices, I would think that you would be fine to make whatever changes to the guest list that you'd like, since it's considered a new event. I'm not sure if that's the proper etiquette though, I'm curious to see what other people respond with!

I think you made a good call by not providing your original guests any more detail than that your May 2020 celebration had been cancelled (vs. postponed, "new date to be determined/announced," etc.). I'd say you're free to revise your guest list and cut/add people. I would just keep my future plans wrapped up tight until I was 100% sure of the new date since your venue has some pretty strict determining factors!

I’d treat it as a new event since you sent out cancellations.

My take is this: since you sent out cancellations and didn't mention a new date, I think you are totally good. "So at what point is it okay to change up the guest list or just start from scratch and treat the guest list like it is for a new event?" Any time you want to! You got this! I wish you the best of luck with your planning!!

Totally agree with everyone- treat this like a new event!

I'm in a similar boat. My fiance and I got engaged while in school with the plan to marry 1 year after graduation (summer 2020). Even though we moved to a new city, much of our original guest list were friends from college. With the year-long postponement, we've developed new work friends in the city where we live and lost touch a bit with our friends from college. In the end, we decided to only invite 2 new coworkers to the wedding, and we'll see what happens with our college friends. They are still invited, but I am operating on the assumption that they probably won't come since they would have to travel.

Thanks all!

Not sure if anyone will read this follow up question, but do you think we would need to create a whole new wedding website if we are having a new event? I'm guessing I'll need to create a new account on whatever platform we decide to use and make sure it has a new URL. I'd really like to use the old one to save some work but am worried if we just update the existing website to reflect a new event, guests who may no longer be invited would see it and might be confused or there might be hurt feelings (in all likelihood, no one but me is stalking our wedding website). Just wondering what you would all recommend!

View Quoted Comment I think from an etiquette standpoint it’s fine, but the domains do usually expire after a year or two so I’d check that.

View Quoted Comment

We just used The Knot for our wedding website, and didn't purchase a unique domain at all (our URL is simply theknot.com/ournames) so I'm pretty sure we can use it as long as we want.

We are still well away from having a Plan C, so its not something I guess I need to worry about right now, but good to know if the time ever comes.