Escort Cards versus Place Cards
Early on in wedding planning, I decided that I did not want to have a sign-in table at our reception. I wanted to maximize the time our guests had during our cocktail hour and reception, and standing in line at a sign-in table went against those plans. I still needed a way for guests to locate their table numbers, so eliminating a reception sign-in table completely was out of the question. This led me to the wonderful world of escort cards versus place cards which, prior to wedding planning, meant the same thing to me.
Escort Cards
An escort card is a small card arranged alphabetically at the wedding reception entrance that lists the guest’s name and table number (we would also include an indicator for entrée choice). I originally thought escort cards would work perfectly; we could set up a table at the entry to our reception area with escort cards for guests to find at their leisure. The problem with this option was that we worried guests would misplace or throw away their escort cards, and since it was critical the servers know their entrée choice, we didn’t want to take that risk.
Image via Snippet and Ink // Photo by Christina McNeill

Place Cards
A place card is a small card indicating a guest’s specific seat at the table. This option would solve our issue with guests not placing their escort cards at their seats since the place card would already be there; however, we could not use place cards alone as our guests wo...