One of the least liked wedding planning tasks, but one that can be made easier thanks to a little tech.
Hunting down late RSVPs, finalising your wedding day timeline, and squeezing in last-minute beauty appointments – the weeks counting down to your wedding date can be challenging. One of the all-important planning tasks that needs to be completed in the final weeks of wedding prep, is finalising creating a wedding reception seating chart. A task, along with the guest list, it's best not to put off, but couples usually want to! It often takes a few tries (or sometimes, more than a couple of tries) to get the right mix of guests seated together. Therefore, save yourself the stress, and complete this task early.
A Wedding Reception Chart Will Solve Guest Seating Dilemmas
When working on your wedding guest seating chart template, you'll be mixing friends from different parts of your lives with multiple social circles. While navigating the personalities of your immediate, and extended family members from both of your tribes. And then there's the other guests that don't necessarily fit neatly into a category, such as close family friends, work colleagues, and those who've meant a great deal to the two of you through the years. Where do they sit?!
Some of your guests will be single, others coupled up or married, others divorced or attending solo for other reasons. And these various relationship statuses need to be considered, as they can affect how guests get on with each other. Consider the potential for family drama. Keep bitterly divorced parents separate, seat newly-weds away from those who just went through a major breakup. And don't forget about past romantic relationships between guests that may now cause some awkwardness. They're unlikely to want to sit on the same together, or maybe they would?!
At the end of the day, you want everyone to have a wonderful time at your reception. But to achieve that, you need to find harmony in your wedding seating chart. Where, and who, your guests sit with will play a major part in how successful your reception will be. With so much riding on the outcome, we thoroughly understand how putting together your wedding seating chart can be a little nerve-racking, and challenging.
But before you start panicking, let's take a deep breath and pause for a moment. This is the 21st Century, and there are some pretty fantastic (and free!) online seating chart websites out there that can help you streamline the whole process. Online spaces that allow you to freely move guests around from table to table with ease, and even design the entire celebration space digitally, based on the actual specs from your venue. These digital options produce easily sharable results, ensuring suppliers, wedding planners and key family members are on the same page.
5 Online Wedding Guest Seating Chart Websites that'll Streamline Your Planning
This unique wedding seating chart tool from Online Wedding Planning Assistant will help you effortlessly plan the floor plan of your reception or ceremony. It has an easy-to-use drop and drag system, and is connected to countless other free planning tools.
Connect Guest List
Upload your guest list from Excel and instantly start placing people around the various tables.
Assign Meal Options
Allow your catering team to quickly see which guest has chosen which option by highlighting it on the seating chart. Allergies too can also be clearly labelled.
Quickly Create to Scale
Outer and inner walls can be quickly added to a floor plan using real-world dimensions.
It's easy to decide who's sitting where, by mapping out a custom floor plan and assigning guests their seats with the Hitched Seating Chart.
Create Your Floor Plan
Add tables, a dance floor, DJ booth and anything else to visually recreate your reception layout.
Seat Your Guests
Automatically sync with your Guest List — all you have to do is drag and drop guests into their seats!
Share Your Seating Chart
Print, email or export your Hitched Seating Chart as a list or in your seating format to pass along to others.
When professional event planners, caterers, and other suppliers pay to use an online tool to draft seating charts for their events, you know it's a good. Fortunately, AllSeated offers couples complimentary access to its online suite of tools. All you need to do is import your guest list from Excel and assign tables based on your to-scale floor plan.
The AllSeated tool can seem a little overwhelming at first, with so many options available to choose from. But once you dive in, and start playing around, you'll find it's easy enough to build the perfect wedding seating chart.
This one isn’t technically an app but, if you’ve been pouring over your wedding seating chart for so long, that you’re now no longer sure who’s sitting where – Top Table Planner could offer a solution.
With fully customisable table shapes and layouts, you’ll be able to figure out exactly who is sitting where and move guests around with no issue, even if your guest list numbers fluctuate at the last minute…!
Works on Any Device
Take your wedding seating chart wherever you go, with the ability to edit on any screen.
Free Trial
This seating plan maker is a paid for service, but they do offer a 7-day free trial.
Print Table Plan
Easily print your table plan on any paper size using their intuitive software.
While this tool isn't as robust as those above, it certainly will help set you up for success. Especially when you consider all of the other useful tools they provide. You'll need a free Zola account to start creating your seating chart, but once you're logged in, planning'll be a breeze.
Add in the number of tables you're planning and assign guests to each table. Zola's seating chart tool will visually display them based on RSVPs, allowing you to filter out certain groups. Once your list is complete, you can download the finished chart in an Excel spreadsheet for easy access.
