Before I move on, I want to show you one more piece of our wedding website that I am very excited about... and that I had pretty much nothing to do with. I have already told you that the Architect is the design genius behind our website, so really, the credit is all his anyways. But... he decided that he had to show off just one more time during the design process, by putting together this lovely form for me:
Click on the image below for a larger version
See... there are literally hundreds of hotels, motels, inns, B&Bs, and rental houses to choose from in the Bar Harbor region, so we sort of expect that our guests are going to be scattered all over an area covering many tens of square miles. (We have put together room blocks at a couple of hotels, but I'm still pretty sure that a large number of our guests are going to find their own accommodations.)
Seeing that 95% of our guests are from out of town, we would still like to treat them to things like out-of-town bags, and complimentary transportation to our wedding. (Don't worry, I will blog about all of this later on.) So... it would really help us if we knew where our guests were planning on staying. As an added bonus, this information will also allow us to hound some of our procrastinating guests, who may have the tendency to wait too long to book their hotel rooms.
Rather than calling or emailing each of our guests to figure out where they are planning on staying during the weekend of our wedding, the Architect pointed out that he could easily create a quick response form for our website, where our guests could reply to a short questionnaire about their chosen accommodations.
It took the Architect about an hour to put together the form with some software that comes with his website host (and then at least another hour to deal with all of my "minor" tweaks)... and then he put together some snazzy html to imbed the form into our wedding website. The responses to the survey will now automatically download into a spreadsheet that we can check at any time.
Et voila!! Done and done.
Now, while our invitations won't be going out for a number of months, we will still be able to gauge which of our guests are planning on attending our wedding, and how far they have come with their travel plans. This is especially important since our wedding is taking place smack in the middle of tourist season in Bar Harbor, and summer hotel rooms tend to book up way in advance.
Destination wedding brides, how are you keeping track of your guests travel arrangements (if at all)? Are you doing anything to encourage your guests to book their travel and accommodations in a timely fashion?
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