Table seating plans are one of the most complicated parts of planning a wedding. Getting all the dates and times to line up is difficult. Getting all the right people invited from the guest list isn’t easy. But by a wide margin, choosing where everyone can sit is the most troublesome part of the planning, and getting it wrong can lead to family arguments and rifts that are entirely unnecessary on such an important day.
There are a few different ways you can plan the seating arrangements at your wedding, but whichever way you choose, you’re going to have to make some tricky decisions to start with – and online wedding tools may be the best way forward.
Where the Difficulty Begins
When you’ve put together a guest list that includes friends, family, and acquaintances, you will have a general idea of where everyone should sit. The logical thing is to put family members together, and to put people near other people they know.
Parents with young children will likely be seated together, unless you have a table exclusively for all the children in attendance. This might also apply to young adults and teenagers too, as they might all want to sit together.
And all of that is fine - the problems arise when personalities and history are taken into account.
A long time ago, Uncle Bob had an argument with Cousin Nora. This has stuck with them for years, and there is no way Uncle Bob should sit anywhere near Cousin Nora, so you draw up a nice plan and put Cousin Nora on a different table.
As you plan the rest of the event, you forget about Cousin Nora sitting on her own, and ultimately finish up with one table left and the only occupant being Cousin Nora. That’s fine, there are still five more people to seat, so you put them on that table.
Unfortunately, one of those five is Cousin Ike, who is Uncle Bob’s son. Cousin Ike has taken onboard his father’s views of the world, and would immediately start an argument with Cousin Nora. So you move Cousin Nora to another table, which means breaking a family apart, and putting a family member on a work associates table.
The family member knows none of the people they are sitting with, and so would have a miserable time. You’d swap them again, but if you do, you’ll have to put Uncle Bob on the children’s table, and there’s no need for that.
If only there were an easier way of creating wedding table seating plans that didn’t drive you insane!
Online Table Seating Plan Tool
Online wedding tools for creating wedding seating charts are the ideal solution to all the problems you face when trying to get everyone where they need to be.
You can start off by choosing your tables, where they will be, and how many people can sit around them. You can add all the people and move them around as necessary until you are satisfied that war won’t break out before the first dance.
Being entirely digital, it is easy to swap people (and families) from one table to another, and try out different seating arrangements as you see fit. The ability to save multiple layout templates is a great benefit, as you may find that you’re 99% happy with what you’ve done but just want to try it an alternative way to see how it goes.
By trying multiple options, you will more than likely find one that resonates with you and seats everyone in an appropriate place.
The great news is that you don’t have to do this alone.
There might be a few family members you trust who can tell you the entire history of why person X doesn’t like person Y. With a digital table seating plan, you can share your ideas with these family members via the internet and get their valuable input before making a firm decision on what is happening.
This will help prevent major arguments at a later stage!
A further benefit of being able to share a table seating plan is that you can give access to your guests before they arrive at the venue. There’s nothing worse than arriving at a wedding party and discovering a whole bunch of tables with little name tags on…and then having to walk around every single table to try to identify where you are meant to be sitting.
By supplying this information earlier in the process, your guests will have a much simpler time finding where they are meant to be seated, and you reduce the risk of a guest who is bored searching for their name going rogue!
Why Can’t You Use a Paper Plan?
There are many reasons as shown above – you can’t share it for one thing – but the most compelling is the amount of trouble it would be to create a paper plan. If you draw it in pencil, you can erase mistakes and simply make changes. After a while, the paper will become dirty due to all the erasing, and it only takes a momentary lapse to erase a person and never put them back!
You might try cutting table shapes out of paper, and using smaller pieces of paper to represent people sitting at the table, but that means your work can be destroyed by a gust of wind.
Alternatively, you might write a list of who is sitting at each table, but that doesn’t allow you to fully visualize the layout of the room.
None of these methods are as visual or as flexible as using an online table seating plan tool.
Furthermore, none of these methods are easily shared with family members or close friends for review, nor are they suitable for sending out to people before the event to enable them to find their seats easily.
With the ease of access to all kinds of internet-connected devices available these days, an online seating plan generator is the best method for getting one of the most important parts of your big day organized and prepared.