Four days is the standard, and it is the standard for a reason. It fits Haldi, Mehndi, Sangeet and the wedding day with a welcome dinner on the evening people land, and it keeps guests for four nights, which is the length most people will take off work for a wedding abroad.
Three days
Doable, and it means combining. Usually the Haldi and Mehndi share a day, morning and afternoon, and the Sangeet moves to the evening before the wedding.
It saves a night of accommodation for every guest, which across three hundred people is a real number. It also makes for a compressed and slightly frantic week, and the Sangeet the night before the ceremony means a tired mandap morning.
Four days
Day zero is arrivals and a welcome dinner. Day one Haldi. Day two Mehndi. Day three Sangeet. Day four the Baraat, the ceremony and the reception. Day five brunch and departures.
That is five nights of accommodation for anyone arriving the day before, which is most people.
Five days and more
Adds a rest day in the middle, usually with an optional excursion, and separates the Mehndi from the Sangeet so nobody is dancing with wet henna.
Guests appreciate the breathing room. The cost is another night of rooms and another day of staffing, and attendance on the extra day is always lower than the RSVP suggested.
What guests can actually sustain
Attendance decays, and it decays faster than anybody plans for. Day one is everybody. Day two is everybody. By the third afternoon a proportion of your guest list is asleep by a pool, and by the fourth the older guests are conserving themselves for the evening.
That is not a failure, it is arithmetic: heat, late nights, a flight and a time change. What it means is that the most important events should not be at the back of the week, and that an optional afternoon on day three does more for the reception than another organised lunch.
| Days | Events | What it costs, beyond money |
|---|---|---|
| Three | Four, tightly packed | Two events in one day, twice. Nobody rests and the build crews work through |
| Four | Five or six | The usual shape. One double day, one lighter one, and the ceremony not on the last morning |
| Five | Six or seven | Comfortable to attend and expensive to run. Attendance on the added day is always below the RSVP |
| Two | Three | Rarely discussed and entirely viable under 150 guests. A Mehndi evening, then the day |
The two day wedding nobody proposes
Under about a hundred and fifty guests, a two day programme works and almost nobody suggests it. A Mehndi that runs into a Sangeet on the first evening, then the ceremony and the reception on the second.
It suits families who are bringing a smaller party a long way, it halves the accommodation, and it means every guest attends everything rather than choosing. It is not a compromise at that size. It is the right shape, and it is worth saying out loud before a four day programme is assumed.