Designing the guest experience

Ask someone about a wedding they attended five years ago and they will rarely describe the flowers. They will tell you that they got lost on the way, or that there was a cold glass of something waiting when they arrived, or that they stood for forty minutes in the sun with nowhere to put a drink. Guest experience is the sum of those small mechanical facts, and it is designed or it is left to chance.

The journey starts before the day

The invitation sets an expectation of tone. The information that follows sets an expectation of competence. Travel notes that answer real questions, which airport, how long the drive actually takes at that hour, what the evening temperature will be in the hills, do more for a guest's sense of being looked after than any welcome gift.

Arrival is the first design decision of the day

The first ninety seconds tell a guest what kind of event this is: where to leave the car, who greets them, whether there is shade, whether they have to ask a question to know where to go. Removing the need to ask questions is most of the work.

Comfort is not the opposite of beauty. It is the condition that lets people notice it.

The rhythm of the day

Every celebration has a shape: moments of density and moments of release. Two hours of standing after a ceremony is a design failure, however good the canapes are. So is a dinner that arrives before people are hungry, or speeches placed where the light is at its most beautiful and the energy at its lowest.

We plan the day as a series of transitions, and we plan the transitions first. Where do eighty people go while the room is turned around. Who tells them. What they hold in their hands while it happens.

Afterwards

The morning after is part of the design, not an epilogue. It is often the moment guests speak to each other most freely, and the one families remember with the most affection. It deserves a plan: a time, a place, food that suits a slow start, and an ending that does not need to be announced.