If you are attending a seated event, such as a gala dinner, where you sit is all important. You are going to remember who you sat next to long after you have forgotten about what you ate, or the colour of the napkins. But letting guests pick their seats themselves is rarely a good solution. It can result in groups split up, VIP guests sat at the back of the room and servers having a hard time serving the right food to the right guests.
So it is almost always a good idea for the event planner to arrange a seating plan. However, seating plans are one of the tasks that event planners dread the most. It is hardly surprising when you consider the mathematics. There are more ways to seat just 60 guests in 60 seats than there are atoms in the observable universe. And you must take account of multiple factors, such as guest role, seniority, gender and (depending on the event) partners/families. And then guests cancel at the last minute. If you have multiple seatings, where you don't want the same guests to sit together twice, that adds a whole extra level of complexity. It is a tough problem.
We have been heavily involved in everything to do with seating plans for over 20 years now. Here are our tips for making seating plans more manageable and less stressful.
1. Start your seating plan in plenty of time
This might seem obvious, but event planners often underestimate the amount of time and effort required, even with the best tools. You really don’t want to be trying to do the seating plan the day before the event.
2. Understand your rules of engagement
Get clear instructions from the event sponsors about what criteria are important for seating. Should couples sit next to each other or on the same table? Is it important to alternate gender? Should people from the same families or organizations be kept together or split up?
3. Assign VIP seats first
Assign your VIP guests to seats first. Then fill in all the other guests around them.
4. Colour code guests on the seating plan
The human brain has evolved to be excellent at visual processing. So take advantage of this by colouring your guests by important criteria on the seating plan, e.g. which organization they belong to.
5. Good enough is good enough
There are so many different factors to balance in a seating plan that you are never going to get a completely perfect arrangement that everyone is 100% happy with.
6. Don’t tell guests where they are seated ahead of time
If you tell people ahead of time where they will be sitting, they may ask to change seat. Which makes your life even harder. So don't tell them! Unless it is a VIP guest and you have no choice. Also sitting someone next to a stranger, that they might not have chosen to sit next to, can lead to all sorts of serendipitous outcomes. That is part of the joy of face-to-face events.
7. Name tables
Consider naming, instead of numbering, tables. That way guests can't get offended about not being on table 1.
8. Expect last minute changes
Someone always cancels. Usually just after you have printed the seating chart and place cards! So have a plan for how you are going to cope with this.
9. Use the right tool
We recently conducted a poll of event planners on LinkedIn and 52% of respondents said they were using Excel to do seating plans.
Excel really isn’t the right tool for the job. Especially for large events. Use something designed specifically for table seating plans. Our PerfectTablePlan software can do everything from automatic seating assignment, printing the floor plan, generating reports and printing place cards. It is also very affordable
10. Don’t expect the new wave of AI software to be much help
Large Language Model AI software, such as ChatGPT, can do some very impressive things. But they are designed for processing text, not for combinatorial optimization problems. And they won't draw you a floor plan, print place cards or many of the other things an event planner needs to do. Maybe a general purpose AI will be able to do all that one day. But we expect anyone reading this will have long retired by then.
