Destination Wedding - Welcome Dinner?

If you host it, you pay.

Exactly what Celia said !!!

I'm glad you asked the question. You will save yourself, and possibly others, tremendous awkardness and embarrassment.You never, ever invite people to dinner, then tell them they have to pay for their meal.

This is what I was thinking. thanks y'all!

I'm having a DW and no Rehearsal. We decided to have a laid back get together and in property we are renting for the week. We'll have drinks and catered food for our very few guests.

Eta: words

We didn't have a rehearsal for our DW but we had a dinner. DHs parents insisted. We tried to have meals with our family and friends while we were there and tried to pay and someone always stole the check.

My parents threw a dinner the night after the wedding and were going to pay, but Hs family insisted they wouldn't come if they couldn't pay their own way.

You always pay if you invite them. We had a welcome dinner and paid for a buffet dinner and drinks. It was very expensive, but I'm glad we did it because it gave us a chance to spend some quality time with a lot of our guests the night before.

We did a welcome dinner too at our DW and covered the food/bar tabs. It gave us a chance to do table visits and thank all of our guests for coming before the wedding. Because of that, we were able to spend our reception together which was exactly what we wanted. It was around $4500 for the welcome dinner.

If you extend an invite, I would think you should pay for it.

We're doing a welcome picnic the day before and a kickball game we'll have sandwiches/wraps/fruits/veggies/desserts and some drinks!

We can't afford a welcome dinner for the roughly 90 people I'm inviting from across the country. We are having our private rehearsal dinner which future in laws are graciously paying for and then we will be hitting up a bar afterwards if anyone wants to meet us there. That way we'd get to see anyone who would want to come out in a casual setting and not have the worry of hosting them for a proper meal. We've done this when we traveled for friends weddings and it's always fun to go out for a drink all together!

We did our rehearsal dinner & invited all our guests to it as a thank you for coming to our DW. we were able to find a restaurant down the road from the hotel & they gave us a "buffet" pricing but couldn't provide an actual buffet as the area we had our rehearsal dinner in was small. We had our DW in Puerto Rico, so we have rice with pigeon peas, pork & a salad & dessert. My brothers then started ordering some appetizers that they told the waitresses that they would pay for. otherwise we paid for everyone & even had a vegetarian meal added (our friend's FH just recently became vegetarian & we wanted to accommodate him as well since we didn't know beforehand). The restaurant actually added his meal at no extra charge.

We had a DW and invited all of our guests to the RD. I felt if everyone was traveling for our wedding I should at least offer the invite.

We're having a DW and can't afford to do a RD for everyone the night before. So we plan on doing a "we'll be at the bar at 8 pm, come say hi and hang out" kind of thing. As nice as it would be to have everyone for dinner, we just likely won't be able to afford it. So we'll have a small dinner, then greet everyone after.

You could have a welcome reception, like after dinner time, with just beer/wine/appetizers

If you are hosting and inviting everyone then you should pay. If you can't afford it, them don't do it. A welcome dinner is a nice added event for guests but it is not necessary.

We did a welcome dinner for all of our out of town guests, because our wedding was in my hometown and his family and most of our friends don't live near there. We kept it simple - we did had fish, chicken strips, mozzarella sticks and french fries fried on site, plus cheese and veggie trays and cookies. And a keg. The whole thing was around $650. We didn't pay for vendors/equipment though because my dad has a side business doing caterings so our family already had the equipment and skill set to accommodate this - it probably would have added another $200. But we fed ~75 people for that amount.

We wanted to do the same but scratched the idea bc if hosted the dinner we have to pay and our is already at about $300 per guest.