Carnival Reception

[april1187]

The max time carnival allows for a reception is 2 hours. What are you ladies doing to get around this? That seems so short! Are you just scheduling for your guest to go to another event together afterwards? Are you just planning a reception through the "event planning" section of the ship so that you can make it longer? Or are you doing something entirely different?

[slord12]

We are having the time to celebrate BIG reception since we are having an embarkation day wedding. We linked all of the sailing guests reservations together so we will be at dinner each night (there's 53 of us so far) and the dining department has been great at reserving a section of the dining room for us. We just plan to extend the celebration throughout the afternoon and for the next several nights! Since it is a short reception for our non-sailing guests we decided to do a nice dinner the night before for everyone to have more time together.

[wed2015]

We also have booked the time to Celebrate Big during embarkation. I have 75 people cruising with us and are all book at the same dinner time. I also and have a dinner at our hotel the night before the wedding to spend more time with the non sailing guest and to get all the information needed out for the next day for all the guest. I am also using this time to give out my OOT bags. If you do a group booking and qualify with enough rooms you can have an event during the cruise for your guest also.

[Mrs. Ram]

We had the 2 hour reception and then planned for formal dinner right afterwards. Our wedding just happened to be on formal night so we all wore our wedding attire. The Maitre D actually announced us and had us dance in front of the entire dining room. I contacted the dining dept. right before our wedding and had our entire party sitting together for dinner. It was nice!

[NL2134]

It didn't seem as short as I had expected it to feel. And we hung out with many of our guests while waiting at port and boarding, so really we got to spend much of the day with them, not just the 2 hour reception.

 

We also did a pizza party get together at our hotel the night before the wedding, so we had more time to spend with the non-sailing guests. We had 25 people and our hotel was kind enough to let us use the dining/great room for free for a couple hours. We just ordered a few pizzas and soda for everyone. It was a lot of fun.

 

After the reception, we did the posed photos with photographer, so there wasn't any time to do anything then anyway. But, we did have everyone (well, all sailing guests at least) meet up for dinner that night in the main dining room, so that kind of was a continuation of the celebration. During the cruise everyone kind of ate wherever they wanted, but we did arrange for everyone to eat together in main dining room for the last formal night.

 

We looked into hosting an additional event through the cruise ship for later in the week, but decided against it. And just having everyone eat together at formal night was plenty.