Did You Choose/are You Choosing a Welcome Party or Rehearsal Dinner? How was it?

We had sort of a combined rehearsal dinner/welcome dinner. Only those involved in the wedding came to the rehearsal, but then we all went to a venue and met with (most of) the out of town guests, and had a dinner. It was fun!

After the dinner we and some of the bridal party went across to this bar that offered shots in "glasses" made of ice (which you then got to throw at the wall). After that H went to a hotel for the night and my mom and I went back to H & my apartment. (My best friend and her husband had their 7 month old with them and he got kicked out of the bar - she added it to his baby book)

View Quoted Comment Oooh so potentially a whole weekend of wedding stuff! Definitely hoping things have improved by October!

View Quoted Comment It sounds like you and your guests had a blast! One of the big contenders for our venue is a historic train station. If we get it we will be able to have the rehearsal dinner in a diner car which I think would be different.

View Quoted Comment Haha, I'm sure that'll be quite the story when they get older. "This one time at a friend's wedding your dad got kicked out of a bar...." That sounds really cool though, getting to throw icy shot glasses at the wall.

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Not the dad - the baby got kicked out lol. It was really fun - the drinks were extremely weak though

We did a combined rehearsal/welcome dinner and had a blast! We had so many guests travelling from out of town so we wanted to include them, and we ended up hosting around 70 guests for the dinner. It was a semi-casual event with heavy app stations. We bought the alcohol in bulk and hired student bartenders to help keep the costs down. It was also a great opportunity to talk to more people in detail, so we didn't feel as much pressure and time crunch to greet every single person at the wedding itself.

We're planning to do a rehearsal dinner only. With the majority of our projected guest list being from out of the area, a welcome dinner is not feasible without turning into a mini wedding in itself and no place to host many either.

View Quoted Comment Oh that does make more sense

View Quoted Comment Oh that's a good idea! Hiring student bartenders. I'll have to keep that in mind when we start looking at vendors. Also getting to some extra time to talk with your guests is good too.

View Quoted Comment That's completely fair. Gotta do what you feel is best for your event!

View Quoted Comment Oh, no, I meant schedule conflicts!


Their place is not huge, but for NYC it's not small, either.
Still. 20 people is a squeeze

View Quoted Comment Well that's good to hear. With all the horror stories you hear.....haha. Either way, it's nice that they already had somewhere to help with hosting it.

We had a rehearsal dinner. It was really nice to spend that time with our families & bridal party before the wedding day festivities.

View Quoted Comment Very nice. I'm glad you guys enjoyed it

We’re having a rehearsal dinner and then inviting everyone else to meet up with us for drinks and live music. Most of our guests are from out of town, so a welcome dinner would be way too much. As it is, we have 40 guests for the rehearsal dinner.

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Sounds like that'll be a lot of fun, and that's completely understandable. We're expecting around 35 ourselves for the rehearsal dinner not yet counting any out of town guests (which I think you're supposed to invite to the rehearsal too? Is that right?).

View Quoted Comment That used to be the rule back when people didn’t move away from home that much. Now, inviting out of town guests usually isn’t feasible. We’d have to invite nearly our entire guest list, and that’s not realistic for us at all. We are only including bridal party, bridal party significant others, and immediate family (parents, siblings, nieces/nephews).

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I doubt it will be for us either. We're already looking at around 33-40 people for the rehearsal dinner not including any out of town guests. If we included out of town guests, we'd be closer to 70 or so which is almost double what we're anticipating for price.

Everyone we are inviting are within a 2 hour drive amazingly. We will do a rehersal dinner of just pizza at a place we both love. Nothing fancy here.