Map directions from the invitation

The last week before a wedding fills with one question in a dozen wordings: where exactly is it. The answer that stops the question being asked again is a venue the guest can tap. Tapping it opens the maps app already on their phone with your venue in it, and that app takes them the rest of the way from wherever they happen to be standing. Each ceremony carries its own venue, so a day that runs from a house to a temple to a hotel gives each place its own directions instead of one address for the whole wedding.

Why a written address does not get anyone there

An address describes a place to somebody who already knows the area. Outside that, it fails in ordinary ways. Rural venues often have a name and no number, on a lane half the maps have never been told the name of. Venue names repeat, so a guest drives to the branch of the hotel chain that came up first in the search rather than the one in your town. Postcodes cover an area rather than a door, and a guest can end up at the far side of an estate wall with no way through. And the screenshot of a map that goes round the family group chat is a dead image: nobody can route from it, and after two forwards nobody can read it either.

What tapping the location actually does

The invitation does not work out a route itself. It hands the venue over to the maps app on the guest’s phone, and that app does the navigating. Left to itself the invitation builds a Google Maps link, so it opens in the Google Maps app on a phone that has it and in the browser on a phone that does not. Paste a share link of your own and the guest gets whatever that link opens.

That division of labour is the right one. A route you write down in March is out of date by the wedding. Your job is only to make sure the place they are given is the correct place, down to the entrance.

There are two ways the venue gets into that link. Paste the map share link for the venue itself and every guest goes to the exact point you chose. Leave it, and the invitation falls back to a search built from the venue name and the address you typed, which is fine in a city and unreliable down a lane. If the venue has a listing, copy its share link. If it does not, drop a pin at the entrance on your next site visit and use that link instead.

What to write down that a pin cannot say

A map gets a guest to the gate. It does not tell them what to do when they arrive, and that is where the second wave of questions comes from. Write these once, in the words you would use on the phone:

• Which entrance. “Turn in at the service road past the church, not the main gates” saves a line of cars a three point turn.
• Where to park, and what the ground is. A field is a lovely car park in July and a problem after two days of rain.
• How long the drive takes at the hour guests will travel, not at the hour you tested it on a quiet Sunday.
• The last landmark before the turning. Signal fails first on a country road, and a landmark still works when the map has stopped loading.
• One number to call, and not yours on the day. A relative, the venue, or whoever is standing at the door.

Where your design shows a line of detail under each ceremony, that line is the place for the important half of this. The rest can go in the message you send with the link.

Two venues in one day, and the gap in between

A day that moves is where written addresses do the most damage. A ceremony at the family home at ten and a reception at a hotel at seven are two places, and a guest invited to one of them should be given that one. Set the venue on each ceremony rather than on the wedding as a whole, so every ceremony carries its own directions. If you have also ticked which ceremonies a particular guest is invited to, the personal link you send that guest shows those ceremonies and their venues, and leaves out the rest.

Then say the gap out loud. Do not leave a guest to work out that two o’clock at the temple and six o’clock at the hotel means an hour on the road and three hours to fill. Tell them how far it is, and what there is to do in between: a town worth stopping in, somewhere to have tea, the check in time if you have held rooms. A maps app times one car that never pulls over; a family travelling in convoy moves at the speed of whoever needs the toilet, so leave slack around the figure it gives you. If you are laying on a coach, the location your guests need is the pick up point at the pick up time, not the venue.

The guests a link will not reach

Some of them will not tap anything, and the honest answer is that this feature is not for them. The aunt who does not open links will phone you instead, and being told is part of the courtesy. Give her the route in the words she uses: the road, the turning, the landmark, the village before it.

A few others are worth planning for. Guests driving in the dark to a place they have never been want a lift or a daytime run. Guests arriving from abroad need airport to venue, not the venue alone. Anyone who will lose data once they leave the motorway should open the route before they set off. And for the guests who genuinely want paper, a short printed run alongside the links is a reasonable answer, as we set out in the cost guide.

Test it before you send it

Open your own invitation on somebody else’s phone, tap the location, and look at where it puts you. Then ask a friend who has never driven to the venue what they would do next. That check finds the wrong pin, the entrance nobody mentioned and the ceremony you forgot to give an address to, while there is time to fix all three. Guests keep the same link when you edit the invitation, so a correction made in the last week reaches everyone without a second message.

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