Weddingbee boards

Has anyone attended or organized a cocktail wedding reception? What did you like or dislike about the event?  Also wondering if it is truly a savings compared to a sit down dinner. We are planning on inviting about 150 people.   

I have attended one and our reception will be cocktail style.  it's not always the cheaper route so if you are looking to be budget friendly it doesn't always end that way.  we are really excited for ours since it will be very interactive food stations and will hopefully have the guests talking for a long time about it.  Good Luck on whatever you choose for your reception.

We originally planned on having a dinner buffet, but ran into a problem when we wanted to increase our guest list. We decided to go with a cocktail reception to allow for more people (no dinner = less tables that have to be set up = more space = more people), and I'm actually really excited about it! We're having heavy hors d'oeurves and our guests should still have plenty to eat, and they'll have lots to pick and choose from. Plus, the mixing and mingling aspect should be fun too! As far as cost, it's about the same as what we would have paid for dinner with a smaller guest list, but what I like about this is that we can really tweak the menu and therefore the cost. Whereas dinner was a set price, with this option we can add or subtract food based on what we need and what we want to pay, so we get to make sure we have the right amount of food for the right price.

@ Miss Blondie, I also want our reception to be very interactive.  We do plan to have food stations but I just need to get a few quotes from caterers so that we can get idea on the price per person.

@ Goldilocks, I agree the dinner portion is kind of blah so I figured if we had a cocktail reception it would be more interactive.

@ Whitehydrangea, We also wanted to increase our guest list and the venues we absolutely love only have space for 100 people with a sit down dinner but up to 200 people if it was a cocktail reception.

Thank you ladies for your replies. 

We are having a cocktail reception too.  The one thing we keep hearing is to make sure that there is enough seating for everyone!  We were origionally planning on seating for 75% and bar tables for the rest.  Are you dismissing tables?  How many pieces per person?  I feel like the coordinator at our site isn't much help since this is such a new trend. 

@ Shunnedbride, both venues we like recommend you have seating for at least 1/2 of your guests.  Which in our case is about 75 people.  We are bringing in tables and chairs but we are also including high boys so people can put their drinks down.  We want everyone to mingle and dance so we are hoping seating for 1/2 of the people will be fine. I have no idea how many pieces per person since we haven't looked at caterers yet but i'm thinking they will help us out figure how many pieces we should have per person. 

@shunnedbride: We're going to have seating for about half our guests (5, maybe 6 round tables that seat 8-9 plus 3 high tables). Our venue does cocktail receptions all the time, and that's the set up they suggested, so I'm going with it! There are lots of ledges and flat surfaces throughout the room to provide additional places to set down drinks and plates, so I'm hoping that will be enough for everyone. If I had a lot of space to work with I might not mind setting up enough tables for 75-100% of our guests, but our venue is on the smaller side so we don't really have the room. As for food, we are having an average of 1-3 pieces/servings per person, depending on the type of food.

This is such a big help!  As I mentioned before- this style reception is really new in NW IN and hearing from others who have attended such a party is great!