Welcome Party ideas!

Do you mean for out-of-town guests, or at a DW, the night before your wedding? If so, casual is fine! Order pizzas. Or do a BBQ (or catered BBQ).

My family grilled burgers, ribs & chicken at the house they rented at our DW. Fun & yummy!

For out of town gues, we’re calling our wedding destination-ish since so many of the guests are out of town.

We just want something super casual. We were thinking a local park with lawn games and BBQ, but FMIL has concerns about not being able to serve alchohol and MIL worries it’s too informal

You could do it outside of meal hours & just have appetizers to save money? Or somewhere you can bring your own food & alcohol so you don't have to cater? We aren't doing a welcome party, we are just telling hotel guests we will be in the hotel bar that evening if they want to come say hi!

After our RD, we’re having a welcome reception! It will be really casual at the hotel - just desserts and cocktails.

We went for convenience over anything— many of the attendees had traveled a long way already that day, and we didn’t want to make them travel more...So even though we have a favorite little local pub that has a barroom that would’ve been perfect, it was 20 min from the hotel. Instead, we opted for a spot that basically shared a parking lot with the hotel. It was a random Italian spot but the only thing in walking distance (beside in the hotel itself), so we decided to check it out. Turned out they had some tasty apps, great grilled pizzas, and an awesome, reasonably priced wine (and beer) selection. We were sold! On top of that they were super flexible to work with us to get what we wanted— high tops and mingling space , no sit down or passed foods, but plenty available to eat (we didn’t really want to be tasked with providing dinner for everyone BUT we wanted to offer enough food so that no one *had to* go off and find a spot for dinner. We kept it so simple— just a small corner of bar section , running a tab for everyone (we considered only paying for beer and wine but ended up going for everything), and putting in orders of rounds of grilled pizzas and a couple shareable apps when things ran out.
It was basically just like hanging at a bar with all our friends and family and everyone we know haha...but it was awesome. We had lots
of people who traveled after work, so people kind of trickled in and out throughout the night as they arrived (and got tired and left for bed hah!). I think we started at 8 or 8:30, and called it an 8-10:30pm event (....but we ended up shutting the bar down haha.)

we didnt do formal invites— the concept had been kind of word of mouth in the early stages, and then we posted it on our website and included the info in our hotel welcome bags. So, it was open invite, but, largely it was only people from the hotel that were there (I mean, parents came, a few people who were staying at a rental house swung by when they realized some of their ‘crowd’ would be there, but, mostly the local guests did not attend [though I’m realizing most of the truly local guests were my parents/family friends , so, that kind of also makes sense relationship wise!] )....we had tried to info gather for a rough head count (asked about travel plans on our RSVPs), be we ended up WAY underestimating how many we would be (I think a lot of those who were “traveling after work!” ended up ditching out on work way early haha — LUCKILY the restaurant was quiet and large and able to give us some expansion space , but lesson learned : you don’t have to make in an rsvp type of commitment, but if you don’t— build in a guestlist buffer to make sure you have plenty of space

The day before our wedding, we had a welcome barbecue at my parent's house. It was only 10 minutes from our venue so most guests who traveled from out of state already had hotels that were close distance to the house. We had about 75% of the guests attend the barbecue and the party was pretty low-key. I want to say we had spent less than $400 for it all that included all of the food and beverages for a total of near 80 guests.

I’m inviting everyone to the rehearsal dinner and having platters cupcakes and beer