24

May

2013

Diary of a Boho Bride and Groom – Jo and Nick, Entry 4: Planning For The Guests

diary of a boho bride and groom Today we are back with our lovely couple Jo and Nick on Diary of a Boho Bride and Groom. Last time they both talked about The rather controversial subject of Children at Weddings, which proved to really get you talking!  I think this subject will run and run and there really doesn’t seem to be a right or wrong answer!. Today it is all about the wedding guests, and making sure they are happy and logistics run as smoothly as possible. Wedding as you know can be hard to plan and I always say to my couples that the guests themselves can be the thing that causes you the most stress. Jo and Nick seem to have all angles covered though, so I’ll leave it to them to talk you through their plans.

Jo-and-Nick

NICK: Hi to all the Boho readers out there, it’s time for another update from me and Jo and how our wedding plans are coming along. At the moment we are both very much in a Stag and Hen do frame of mind as we will both be on our “last night of freedom” tonight!! We hope to be able to blog about all the shenanigans soon, it all depends on alcohol consumption and if we can remember any of it. For today though we wanted to write about planning a wedding with your guests in mind.

JO: As we’ve previously mentioned, Nick is originally from Liverpool and we both went to university in Manchester. We now live together in Huddersfield, just up the hill from my hometown of Halifax, and when we got engaged we pretty much decided straight away that we wanted to get married locally to our home. We like the idea of being able to see the place we got married regularly, (the church is at the bottom of our street!), and being able to go to the reception venue for a nice meal or a drink whenever we feel like it. However, this also means that over 75% of the guests will be travelling for at least an hour to come to our wedding. Obviously we have family and friends coming from Liverpool, but we also have guests coming from down south in Bristol and up north in Edinburgh. In fact, only 3 of the invitations we posted out had Huddersfield postcodes!

1 Diary of a Boho Bride and Groom

NICK: For this reason, we have made a lot of decisions about the big day with our guests at the front of our mind. We are having our wedding ceremony a little bit later in the afternoon to give people plenty of time to get here, fingers crossed there will be no major traffic hold ups on the M62. We have also hired a vintage double decker bus from the Yorkshire Heritage Bus Company to transport the guests from the church to the venue. The bus is ace and right up our street. Hopefully it will add a bit of theatre to everyone’s journey. In my head I am picturing everyone enjoying themselves driving through the Yorkshire Countryside on a vintage bus humming in unison the theme tune from “Last of the Summer Wine” or “Heartbeat”.

Diary of a Boho Bride and Groom

JO: Originally we were panicking, or rather I was panicking, as I was worried that not all the guests will be able to have a seat on the bus due to it only seating 72. However more recently another problem dawned on us; as so many guests will be checking into hotels, will they wait until after the ceremony to do this? And if so does that mean they will drive their own cars to the church and make their own way to the reception? Nick and I did have a tiny bit of a stress about this but we have tried to make sure that we are aware of who will and won’t be using the bus by putting bus tickets in with the invitations and asking guests to respond on their RSVP if they would like a seat. In the RSVP’s we have received back so far, this appears to be working.

NICK: We wanted to compile a list of hotels to put in with the invites for the guests and this was actually quite easy which surprised me. Huddersfield isn’t a particularly big town or especially touristy, but for reasons unknown to me there have recently been a few new hotels built to go with the several hotels that already existed. The hotels we recommended on our wedding invitations are mostly situated between the church and the venue so as to hopefully keep any taxi costs down for people. We also put the distance each hotel was from both the church and the venue so that the guests wouldn’t be surprised by any travelling between locations.

Diary of a Boho Bride and Groom

JO: We also decided to give our guests a choice of menus at the wedding breakfast. We are having the traditional three course meal and are lucky in the fact that our venue is one of the few ones that does not charge extra when offering options. We also are hoping that this will encourage guests to RSVP promptly as they have to let us know their food choice and can’t simply rely on a word of mouth response. Another reason for giving a choice is because Nick and I couldn’t decide between our favourite deserts! Nick’s being sticky toffee pudding and mine being eton mess, so we decided to have both.

NICK: Planning the wedding with the guests in mind has been stressful but at the same time I think we both realise it could have been worse. Hopefully everything we have planned will come together. From the feedback we have had from some of our guests, ideas like the bus are very much appreciated and our invites were very helpful. What we have also had to realise is that there is only so much we can do, and second guessing other people’s plans is impossible!

And as the big day gets closer we are both getting more and more excited about having all our family and friends around us to share it with.

 

See you on the other side of the Stag and Hen do’s!

Jo and Nick xx

 

 

 

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Comments

    artaquis

    Hi you two,

    I just came across your blog and have to tell you: I REALLY like your wedding planning ideas. The bus is AWESOME! Will have to read the three earlier steps :)

    Cheers!

    Reply
    Jo

    Thank you so much, we love writing the blog and are glad you enjoyed reading it x

    Reply

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