Two plans, a single guest list
This is the separation that avoids the most expensive mistake: duplicating the list. When the ceremony and the banquet are kept in two files, last-minute changes get applied to one and not the other, and the result is one chair too many at the ceremony and one too few at the table.
The right approach is to treat the two spaces as two set-ups of the same event. The ceremony does not usually need named seating — beyond the first two rows — so a headcount is enough; the banquet does need it. But the number of guests is one number and it has to come from one place.
The time between spaces
Moving 120 people from a garden to a function room is not a question of walking: it is a question of people scattering. Between the end of the ceremony and the moment the last guest is seated at the table, a normal wedding takes between 75 and 105 minutes — and only ten of those are spent walking.
The rest is family photographs, the drinks reception and the stretch where nobody wants to go in because it is pleasant outside. It is worth planning with that number rather than the walking one, because it is what determines how long the reception lasts and therefore how much food and how many staff have to go into it.
What gets set up beforehand and what during the drinks
The function room is mostly set up beforehand: tables, linen, cutlery and glassware. What is done during the drinks reception is whatever will not survive waiting — ice, bread, butter, cold starters if there are any — and any adjustments that depend on how the ceremony went.
What should never be left for that window is moving tables. Ninety minutes feels like plenty until the ceremony runs twenty minutes late, and then the team is placing a table while the guests are walking in.
Access: the whole route
Access at a two-space wedding is not solved by looking at each space separately, but at the whole route: parking, getting into the ceremony, the path to the drinks reception, the entrance to the function room, and an accessible toilet reachable from both.
The part most often forgotten is the ground between spaces. A gravel or grass path that everybody else crosses without thinking is impassable in a wheelchair and difficult in heels, and the fix — a walkway, a detour around the side — has to be decided in advance, not on the day.
Rain: the plan B is drawn beforehand
Every venue with an outdoor ceremony has a plan B, and in most of them it lives in the maître’s head: «if it rains we do it inside, we push the back tables aside». That is not a plan, it is an intention.
A drawn plan B answers three questions an intention does not: how many chairs actually fit, how long it takes to go from one set-up to the other, and after what time there is no longer time. With those three written down, the eleven o’clock decision takes two minutes instead of twenty.