I had an Asian Catholic wedding & I should've known my "audience" better. My "10 steps ahead" of planning and timelines were not heard because people DID NOT LISTEN nor DID THEY CARE. :/
I planned and was my own "day-of" coordinator for my wedding. For example: everyone (particularly the older generation) loves to have pictures with the newlyweds at the altar at the church. There was only so much time that we had the church (we only had an hour left after the ceremony for our wedding party to take pictures). I made timelines and schedules - the flower girls and ring bearer would go first (as well as my husband's immediate family bc his sister tends to stare at me a lot and we're not very close. I wanted her OUT of there asap). What happened was that our scheduled "group picture" of all of our guests outside the steps went out of hand - too many guests so we had to move back inside the church. I asked someone to make an announcement that ONLY immediate family and members of the wedding party needed to stay. I'm also very private and I didn't want random guests to take our pictures WHEN WE ALREADY HAD A PHOTOGRAPHER or post them online. I had an unplugged ceremony sign at the beginning too. Instead, random families stayed, watched, took pictures on their phone & posted. Some families were offended and pissed that they didn't get to take pictures with us at the altar. I specifically scheduled our cocktail hour for my husband & I to take pics with our guests and that didn't matter to them. Despite my unplugged ceremony sign, people still posted our wedding pictures on facebook. I had to ask the emcee during dinner to ask the guests to remove and take it down. People's obsession with social media is insane that the newlyweds can't even announce the news ourselves.
During cocktail hour - NO ONE STAYED AT THE PATIO. I kept telling the venue coordinator to make an announcement and she was off somewhere. Everyone went straight to the dining room and it was a somewhat empty outdoor patio (which was a shame bc we had beautiful, sunny weather).
When they were distributing cake (after our cake cutting), i asked the emcee to make an announcement for certain people (names read) to take pictures out at the patio with my husband & I. My husband & I had our cousins from out of town come & we wanted special pictures with them. The emcee read specific names from tables to meet us at the patio. All of a sudden, all of my husband's cousins (local) came out and were staging their own pics & wanted pics of them done in certain poses, asking my photographer to take pictures (bc we all know that it wasn't a wedding they attended. It was a big party with an opportunity to take pictures and put on instagram). I thought that was an appropriate time to take pics while people were having cake but again, NO ONE LISTENED. I had to be assertive & tell them we needed to go back bc there's a program that we still needed to do (we didn't even do dances yet - first dance, father daughter, mother son, etc...). I only scheduled those special pics from 10 minutes.
Also - all of his cousins crashed our bridal suite. It was their own personal hang out room. Some of them snuck in alcohol & just hung out there. Our safe haven was gone. I do have to fault that for our venue coordinator bc she promised us a sign with it locked.
What I highly suggest is to invest in security - if you have a big, stubborn, passionate family - they will not listen. HIRE someone who will be your announcer and people who will enforce the rules aka guide guests to the patio, keep your eye on the bridal room, etc... even as the bride, our guests did not listen to me & it's not really my job to tell people what to do...
