Every question costs you replies. Here are the six worth the price, the four that are worth it only sometimes, and the ones that quietly annoy people.
An RSVP is the only survey your guests will ever fill in gladly, and you get one shot at it. Every question you add makes the form a little heavier and the reply rate a little lower — so each one has to earn its place by being something a specific person will actually act on. This is the working list: what to ask, why, what it costs, and how to word it so the answers are usable rather than merely collected.
Before a question goes on the form, name the person who will read the answer and the decision it changes. The caterer reads dietary. The seating plan reads household and children. The driver reads transport. If no one reads it, it is not a question — it is curiosity, and your guests pay for it in attention.
This sounds obvious and is routinely ignored. The commonest offender is the song request field on a wedding with a string quartet and no DJ.
Not "how many of you are coming." Name each invited person and ask about each one. A household field returns "3 of 4" and leaves you guessing which four; a per-person field returns the actual four names, which is what the seating chart needs and what the place cards are printed from.
This is also where the plus-one question resolves itself. If the invitation named the plus-one, the form names them. If it did not, there is no field to argue with — which prevents the awkward conversation entirely.
Ask it open. Tick lists ("vegetarian / vegan / gluten-free / other") force a guest with coeliac disease to choose between two wrong boxes, and the caterer receives a preference where they needed a medical instruction. An open field costs you a few minutes of tidying and returns the truth.
This is the field almost every wedding omits and every caterer wishes for. "Nut allergy" can mean I would rather not or I carry an adrenaline pen. Those are different kitchens. One short field — Is this a preference, an intolerance, or a severe allergy? — is the highest-value question on this entire list, and it takes four seconds to answer.
Any wedding with a welcome dinner, a next-day brunch or a destination weekend needs to know which guests are present for which parts. Ask it as days, not as a paragraph. The rehearsal dinner count, the brunch order and the room block all come from this one field.
Only ask if you are providing coaches or a shuttle — but if you are, ask, because the alternative is booking for the whole guest list and paying for empty seats. Word it as a commitment rather than a preference: Will you use the coach from the hotel at 15:30? beats Are you interested in transport?, which returns optimism instead of numbers.
Label it plainly — Anything we should know? — and read every answer. This is where you find out that someone is bringing a newborn, that a guest cannot manage stairs, and that your uncle has booked the wrong weekend. It is the cheapest question on the form and the one that most often prevents a real problem.
Meal choice, usually. Unless the caterer requires a pre-order, choosing a main course eleven weeks in advance is a decision guests do not remember making and menus rarely survive intact. Where it is required, print the choice on the place card — it saves the table an entire round of confusion.
"How do you know the couple?" It reads as a quiz. If you need it for seating, you already know it.
Anything you can look up. Addresses you already hold, names you already spelled on the envelope, phone numbers you have. Asking a guest to re-supply something you sent them a card at is a small insult.
Three habits do most of the work. Ask for one thing per question. Ask in the second person, warmly — a form can be gracious and still be a form. And make required fields genuinely required: an optional dietary field returns a blank from exactly the guest whose answer mattered.
Then set a deadline with a private buffer behind it, and let the system chase rather than you. The whole mechanism — deadline arithmetic, card versus link, and chasing without nagging — is in the RSVP guide.
The answers are not a spreadsheet; they are four documents. The caterer gets dietary and severity. The seating plan gets attendance and households. The transport company gets the coach count. The stationery gets the confirmed names, correctly spelled, for place cards and escort cards. A wedding where those four are drawn from one source of truth is a wedding where nobody is reconciling lists at midnight.
Six earn their place on almost every wedding: attendance per named guest, dietary requirements, allergy severity as a separate field, arrival day for anything longer than one evening, transport intention where transport is provided, and a free-text note. Everything else should be justified event by event.
Response rate falls as the form lengthens, and the drop is steepest after about six questions. The practical rule is that a question earns its place only if a specific person will act on the answer — the caterer, the driver, the seating plan.
Yes, and as an open field rather than a tick list. Tick lists force guests to pick the closest wrong answer, and the caterer receives 'vegetarian' when the truth was coeliac. Ask severity separately — a preference and an anaphylaxis risk are not the same instruction.
Evorrah's RSVP is per guest and already knows who it is talking to — dietary detail, households, plus-ones and reminders, in your suite's own type.
RSVP & guests at Evorrah How RSVP management works
Deadlines, questions worth asking, and chasing without nagging.
Guest list to locked plan — method, politics, and the display.
Three hundred invitations for three hundred people — what per-guest design changes.