How to Share Your Seating Plan With Your Venue (and What They Need From You)

The simplest way to share your seating plan with your venue is to give them one version they can rely on, not a string of attachments. Send the room plan, the guests by table, and every meal choice and dietary note in the guest's own words. Then make sure they see the latest version if anything changes.

This guide sets out what a venue and caterer need from you, why dietary notes matter, and how to share the plan with Fizz on Celebrate and Champagne using one link and a PIN.

What your venue and caterer need from your seating plan

Your venue and caterer are working from your plan to set the room and cook the food. In practice that means five things:

• The room. Where the tables go, how many there are, and where the dance floor, bar and top table sit.
• Who sits where. Guest names by table, so the team can lay the right number of places and number the tables.
• Meal choices. If you are serving a plated meal, what each guest chose.
• Dietary needs and allergies. Every note, in the guest's own words.
• The latest version. A plan that was right last month is not much use if three tables have changed since.

Ask your venue for two dates as early as you can: when they need your final numbers, and when they need the table plan and dietary list. Every venue sets its own, so check your contract and put both in your calendar.

Why dietary notes and allergies need to reach the kitchen word for word

In England, Northern Ireland and Wales, a business that provides food must tell customers if it contains any of 14 listed allergens, according to the Food Standards Agency. The 14 are celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, and tree nuts.

That duty sits with your caterer. But your caterer can only plan around a guest's allergy if they know about it. A guest's own wording ("severe peanut allergy, carries an EpiPen") tells a kitchen more than a tick in a box or a summary typed by someone else, so pass the notes on exactly as guests wrote them.

Three ways to share your seating plan with your venue

• Email a PDF or spreadsheet. Easy to send, and a snapshot the moment you send it. Every change after that means another attachment, and someone has to check which one is current.
• Print it. Useful on the day, and for the entrance. Not much help for the weeks before it.
• Send a live link. The venue opens one address and always sees the plan as it stands now. On Fizz, this is the venue link.

Most couples end up using more than one. A live link for the weeks of changes, and a PDF or print for the day itself.

How to share your seating plan with your venue in Fizz

The venue pack and venue link are on Celebrate and Champagne. Here is how to make one.

1. Open the seating planner and choose Venue pack.
2. Look at the preview. It shows exactly what your venue and caterer will see, including dietary notes in your guests' own words.
3. Add a short note for the venue if you like, for example a reminder about the evening buffet.
4. Choose the day the link closes. It can be the day of your wedding or up to 14 days after it. If you do not change it, it closes 8 days after.
5. Choose Make the link. You get a link and a six-digit PIN. The whole link is shown once, so copy it straight away. You can read the PIN again later.
6. Send the link, and send the PIN a different way, by text or phone.

Your venue opens the link, types the PIN and sees the plan. They do not need an account. The seating planner page shows the venue pack, and our guide to seating plans for each wedding meal covers weddings with more than one meal.

What your venue sees, and what they do not

They see the room drawn to scale, the guests by table, whether a guest is a child, each guest's meal choices, and every dietary note, with the allergens in the dishes guests chose. They also see a note from you if you wrote one.

If you serve more than one meal, each meal has its own plan and its own venue pack, so the breakfast caterer sees only the breakfast guests and the evening caterer sees only theirs. Each pack shows the caterer line for that meal, including the meals you added for suppliers such as your photographer and band, and lines for people who need no meal and for children who need a highchair. Guests who ticked "This is an allergy" next to their dietary note are marked, so the kitchen reads those first.

They do not see email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, RSVP messages, or guests who said no or maybe. Your seating rules are not part of it either. Guests are told on the RSVP form that the couple, their venue and their caterer can see their dietary notes.

When the plan changes after you have sent it

The link always shows your latest plan. The page shows a version number and lists what has changed since the earlier versions, such as a guest moved, a table renamed, or a dietary note added or changed. Allergy notes are marked so they are easy to spot. Your venue can also download the same pack as a PDF with your names and the date on every page.

Keeping the link safe

Anyone with the link and the PIN can see your guests' names and dietary notes, so send them only to people who need them. Five wrong PINs in a row lock the link for 15 minutes. You can change the PIN at any time, which stops the old one working at once, or switch the link off completely.

Your checklist for sharing the plan with your venue

• Ask your venue when they need final numbers, and when they need the table plan and dietary list.
• Wait until most RSVPs are in before you send the first version.
• Preview what your venue will see.
• Send the link and the PIN by different routes.
• Tell your venue the link updates, and where to find the changes.
• Download a PDF to bring on the day.
• Switch the link off or let it close once the wedding is over.

Disclaimer

This guide is general information, not legal or medical advice. Allergen rules and venue contracts differ, so check the detail with your venue, your caterer and the Food Standards Agency.

Sources

• Food Standards Agency: Allergen guidance for food businesses