The six things guests actually need to know

It is easy to overestimate how much your guests know. The invitation arrived in March, it is in a drawer, and in August they are standing in the square wondering whether the ceremony was at two or at three. Everything that follows is written for that moment.

1. When and where, in that order

The time of the ceremony, and the address. Not the name of the venue on its own — “Fjellstua” is not an address, and a guest who types it into a map ends up at a completely different mountain lodge. Write the address, and make it tappable.

2. Which table they are at

This is the one fact that creates a queue. Fifty people looking for their name on a sheet of A3 by the entrance takes twenty minutes and creates a bottleneck exactly where the photographer needs to work. A sheet with a QR code in the same spot lets each of them search for their name on their own phone and get the table directly, and who is sitting at it.

If you have an iPad to put out, it can stand in kiosk mode with the name search and return to the start screen by itself after each guest. That solves the other half: the ones who left the card at home.

3. What happens when

Not the whole run sheet — that is yours, and it contains things guests should not see. But the big items: when the ceremony starts, when dinner is, when the cake arrives, roughly when it is over. That lets people know whether they have time to go back to the hotel and change.

4. Dress code, in plain words

“Smart” means four different things to four different people. Write it as a sentence somebody can shop from: dark suit, long dress, bunad welcome. And if any of the ceremony is outdoors on grass, say so — that decides the choice of shoes for half the guest list.

5. Practicalities: accommodation, transport, children

• Whether there is a hotel rate, and what the code is called.
• Whether there is a bus from the venue, and when the last one leaves.
• Whether children are invited. This is the question people are most reluctant to ask.
• Whether there is parking, or whether the answer is a taxi.

6. Who to ask

Not you. On the day you will not have your phone in your hand, and in the four weeks before it you have enough to do. Name one person and one number — the best man, the toastmaster, an aunt who keeps things in order — and write it clearly. That is the single addition that saves you thirty messages.

Everything above fits on one page and can be read in twenty seconds on a phone in a hallway. That is the whole ambition. A guest who knows where to sit and when the food is coming is a guest having a good time — and that, after all, is why they were invited.