Arguably the most important part of your wedding day outside of actually getting married, is what’s happening between every item on your itinerary, wedding timeline transitions. For example, how the couple exits the ceremony space and then re-enters the reception space, or what needs to happen for guests between cocktail hour and sitting down to dinner, to make it a seamless experience for everyone.
This is where a professional wedding planner can really come in handy, because transitional elements are often hard to pin down in your wedding timeline, and they’re quite different for every wedding.
I’ll give you an example from the most recent wedding I did day-of coordination for. The brides were to return from a boat ride for their golden hour photos, greet new arrival guests, change outfits and then prepare for a second grand entrance. Between each of these pieces, we had to reserve spaces, and add key people to assist with corralling guests, organizing a space to change outfits, and set the scene for the grand re-entrance.
After we reviewed it, we went from this:
- Return from golden hour photos boat ride
- Greet guests in lobby
- Change
- Grand re-entrance
To this:
- Return from golden hour photos
- Brides hide around the corner with photographer as new guests arrive on water taxi
- Guests disembark and convene in lobby – Best Man to direct guests
- Guests receive drink tickets for bar – Family member to distribute drink tickets
- Best Man to bring brides back into lobby to greet guests
- Greet guests in lobby
- Brides return to lobby to greet guests
- Photos with new arrival guests in white dresses
- Coordinators send new arrival guests up to reception area to clear the way for grand re-entrance
- Change
- Brides to bridal suite to get changed with bridesmaids
- Coordinators prepare two family members with satin sheet to hide brides for re-entry
- Bridesmaids help brides change into new outfits
- Makeup artist touches up makeup
- Veil replaced in bride’s hair
- Grand re-entrance
- Brides to bottom of stairs to prepare for second entrance
- Bridesmaids assist bride up the stairs with dress
- Satin sheet held up and ready
- Bridesmaids move out of the way for clean grand re-entrance photos
- Coordinators signal to MC that brides are ready to be re-introduced
- Satin sheet is dropped as MC asks guests to re-welcome brides
- Photos of new entrance
Wedding timeline transitions are VERY detailed!
As you can see, we went from four transition points to nearly 20! And this level of detail is absolutely necessary in order to keep multiple people organized and going in multiple directions all at the exact same time. Without this level of detail, you might have guests randomly upstaging you during your grand entrance, ruining photo ops, and ultimately throwing you off your game because your expectations aren’t matching up with what’s happening.
So whether you’re DIYing, using a planning app or AI to create your wedding timeline, take the time to work through each specific transition and come up with a plan for who will be doing what during each element, since a lot of these things will need to take place at the same time.
And if you need help with this, I offer a really helpful 3 hour virtual wedding planning package where I can help you identify what needs to happen when. If you want a more hands on approach, I can actually create this for you with packages starting at day-of coordination, to month-of, and even full wedding planning services!
Want to learn more? You can book a complimentary planning call here so that we can get to know each other, and see which service is a good fit for your wedding!