Seating plan: how to seat your guests without stress
A seating plan looks like an impossible puzzle until you follow an order. This is the order.
Only after the RSVPs
There's no point drawing tables before you have the RSVPs: every drop-out breaks the balance. Start when you have 80% to 90% of replies, roughly three to four weeks before — and leave room for last-minute changes, because there will be some.
Choosing table shape and size
Round tables of 8 to 10 seats encourage conversation and are the most common; long rectangular tables look more editorial and help in narrow rooms, but make it hard to talk across the ends. Rule of thumb: 8 seats at a round table are more comfortable than 10, especially with tall centrepieces.
Group by affinity, not by obligation
Seat people with those they would choose themselves: close family near the couple, groups of friends who already know each other, colleagues at the same table. Mixing groups that don't know each other only works when there's an obvious common thread. Spread the 'natural hosts' — the ones who get conversation going — across several tables.
The tricky cases and the final print
Separated families, ex-partners, guests with reduced mobility or special diets: solve these first, because they constrain everything else. Seat anyone with reduced mobility near the entrance and away from the speakers. At the end, print the overview map and the place cards, and hand a copy to the venue and to the day's point of contact. In Journey 2 Yes the seating plan pulls in your confirmed guests, lets you drag each person to a seat, and has a 'seat them for me' that groups by category.