Assigned Seats Vs Assigned Tables - pros and cons please!

You're right, I don't think designating everyone's exact seat is necessary. If there are people who don't get along or don't like each other, seat them at different tables on opposite sides of the room and then your mom's story will be a non-issue.

Just assign tables, people will be fine

I would just assign tables rather than specific seats. Signing specific seats sounds like a pain because at the end of the day they will still be sitting in seat A or E.

Assigned tables would suffice. I would say assigned seats are unnecessary & it's not something you need to add to your list to worry about. Plus, it's more work for the venue &/or coordinator or whomever is assisting you set up. My venue actually charges more for couples that request assigned seats vs. assigned tables.

It was hard enough for me to assign tables (at barely to no help from FH). I couldn't even imagine assigning actual seats. Like you mentioned, I just made sure people would get along based on how we know our friends' and family's personalities are. Your mom just had bad luck, I guess.

Thanks everyone! Really appreciate the input. Going to chat with my mom later and tell her we are only assigning tables, not specific seats.

View Quoted Comment Agree with this

Assigning seats isn’t usually a huge deal unless your caterer requires it because of knowing which meal goes where in case of a plated dinner (you need to know which guest ordered what).

View Quoted Comment Many couples have color coded escort cards for this purpose and let the caterer know which color corresponds with which meal choice.

View Quoted Comment True. It depends on your venue!

View Quoted Comment

Yup! my venue and catering are the same vendor and they're very used to having the cards be the differentiators - haven't decided on different colors or different images yet but either way the cards will tell the waitstaff what goes where.

Without realizing it I think I'm doing both. Looking at my guest list and how I want my FH's family and my family to interact, I labeled my tables as such; grandparents, aunts/uncles, siblings, great uncles/aunts, friends of the G, and friends of the B, friends of the family and cousins. I also carefully placed everyone due to the fact that I wanted everyone to inter-mingle. So what I did, as an example, I put my FH's aunt and uncle, on his moms side, next to their kids then I placed one of MY aunts and her family, from my mothers side, on one side of them and then put another set of Aunts and uncles, with kids, from my dads side, on the other side of them. I kind of did this around the table so that everyone was sat next to someone from either the bride or the grooms side.

This is a visual of the description I tried to give, lol. So, my family is the Brandy with the Y through to Jeff, and Katrina, Brandon and Landon, my Fiancé's mom's side is the Brandi with the I through Aaron, the rest of people at the table are a part of my Fiancé's dad's side of the family. So everyone at the table was interwoven with someone from the Bride and Grooms side of the family but also sectioned out with the detail of the brides mother's/father's side or the Grooms mother's/father's side of the family.


Lol hopes this helps.

We had to do both assigned tables AND assigned seats at our wedding because we had to do plated instead of buffet (thanks, CoVID), and our caterer needed to know what wanted what. It worked out way better than we expected!

We set up our venue ourselves, so we had the seating chart at the head of the room then we put cards at each spot that were color coded.

Hi ! I would say tables, but I did have seats. For ex. there was a table for my colleagues, all of them coming with their spouses except one being single. So I put her between 2 women to be sure that she will be fine talking to her friends and not some strange men ;-) But anyway, at my wedding assignements were necessary, as I wanted people to be able to communicate (so be next to someone who speak their language).

I don't think assigned seats are necessary unless you have those really long farmhouse style tables that seat like 30 people each. For standard round tables of 8, I think that assigned tables are the way to go. We had assigned tables and noted the guests' meal choices on the back of their escort cards with initials (they preselected their entree choices when RSVP-ing). No issues whatsoever!