Guest Attributes: Send Personalised WhatsApp Messages to Every Wedding Guest

At a large wedding, not every guest has the same logistics. Half your guests might be staying at the Taj, the other half at the Leela. Some guests are getting picked up from the airport; others are arriving by their own car. Some have a shuttle from the hotel lobby; some are in a bus from a different pickup point.

When you send a WhatsApp message to all 300 guests telling them “please be at the hotel lobby by 6 PM”, guests at the other hotel get confused. When you send a second message to clarify, you've now created a thread of messages that guests will reread and misinterpret on the wedding day.

The right solution is to send each guest a message that contains their specific information — their hotel name, their pickup point, their bus number. Weddingkart's Guest Attributes feature is built for exactly this.

What Are Guest Attributes?

Guest Attributes are a way to attach custom, freeform data to individual guests in Weddingkart. Think of them as extra columns in your guest spreadsheet — except instead of just storing data, these columns can be dropped directly into a WhatsApp message as a personalised placeholder.

Every attribute has two parts:

When you compose a WhatsApp message in Weddingkart, you can includeHOTEL_NAME anywhere in the message body. When the message is sent, Weddingkart automatically replaces that placeholder with the specific value stored for each guest — so 150 guests at the Taj get one version of the message, and 150 guests at the Leela get another, even though you only wrote the message once.

The Hotel Name Problem (And Why It's the Perfect Use Case)

Destination weddings and large city weddings almost always involve multiple hotels. The couple's family blocks rooms at two or three properties, and guests are assigned to them based on their relationship to the family, budget, or simply availability.

This creates a coordination problem. Every logistics message — shuttle timings, lobby meeting points, breakfast briefings — needs to reference the guest's hotel. Without personalisation, you either:

• Send one vague message that applies to nobody specifically, or
• Send separate broadcasts to each hotel group, managing three different message threads

With Guest Attributes, you set hotel_name for each guest once — either by uploading an Excel file with a “Hotel Name” column, or by adding it directly in the app. Then every message you write can include HOTEL_NAME as a placeholder, and each guest reads their own hotel name in the message they receive.

One message. Zero ambiguity. Every guest reads exactly what applies to them.

What to Use Guest Attributes For (And What Not To)

Guest Attributes work best for information that is known well in advanceand stable enough to commit to in a message.

Good uses

What to avoid

Room numbers are the classic example of what not to send via Guest Attributes. Hotels routinely reassign rooms between check-in batches, upgrade guests at the last minute, or change room numbers due to maintenance. If you send 300 guests their room number via WhatsApp a day before arrival, a significant portion of that information will be wrong by the time they check in — and guests will blame the wedding team for the confusion.

The rule of thumb: if the information can change in the 24–48 hours before the event, do not commit it to a WhatsApp message. Let the hotel handle room assignments at check-in. What you can send is the hotel name itself — that never changes.

How to Set Up Guest Attributes

Option 1 — Through Your Excel File (Recommended)

The simplest way to set Guest Attributes is to include them as columns in the Excel file you already use for guest management. Weddingkart automatically detects any column that isn't a name or phone number as a potential attribute column.

Here's how it works:

1. Add a column called “Hotel Name” (or “hotel_name”, or any variation) to your Excel guest list.
2. Fill in each guest's hotel name.
3. Upload the file to Weddingkart.
4. Weddingkart detects the extra column and asks if you want to import it as a Guest Attribute.
5. Confirm, and the data is saved. Every guest now has a hotel_name attribute.

You can include as many attribute columns as you need. A column like “Pickup Point”, “Bus Number”, and “Hotel Name” can all be imported in a single upload.

Option 2 — Directly in the App

If you need to add or update an attribute for a specific guest — say, a last-minute hotel change — you can set it directly from the guest's profile in the Weddingkart app. Navigate to the guest, open their details, and add or edit any attribute key-value pair. Changes take effect immediately for the next message you send.

How Placeholders Work in Messages

In any WhatsApp message template you create in Weddingkart, you can include attribute names in UPPERCASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES format as placeholders. When the message is sent:

• Weddingkart looks up each guest's attributes.
• Any matching uppercase placeholder in the message body is replaced with that guest's value.
• The guest receives a message with their specific data already filled in.

Beyond custom attributes, Weddingkart also automatically substitutes a set of built-in placeholders like GUEST_NAME, BRIDE_NAME, GROOM_NAME,VENUE, EVENT_NAME, and TIME — no setup required for those.

Validation Before You Send

One practical concern: what if you're about to send a message with HOTEL_NAMEas a placeholder, but you forgot to set the hotel name for five guests? Those five guests would receive a message with the literal text “HOTEL_NAME” in it — which looks unprofessional and confusing.

Weddingkart prevents this with a pre-send validation step. Before you broadcast a message that uses Guest Attribute placeholders, the app checks whether all targeted guests have values for those attributes. If anyone is missing a value, you're shown a list of those guests so you can fill in the gaps before sending.

It's a small safeguard, but on a 400-guest wedding where the couple's family is watching every message, catching a placeholder error before it goes out matters.

A Realistic Wedding Scenario

Here is how a typical destination wedding team uses Guest Attributes across a three-day event:

1. One week before: Upload the final guest Excel with a “Hotel Name” column. Weddingkart imports it as a Guest Attribute for all 280 guests.
2. Three days before: Send a logistics confirmation message: “Your hotel is HOTEL_NAME. Shuttle departs from the lobby at 4 PM on Day 1.” Each guest reads their own hotel. Zero confusion.
3. Day 1 morning: One guest switches hotels last minute. Open their profile in the app, update hotel_name to the new property. Next message they receive will have the corrected value.
4. Day 2: Send the evening event reminder. Same template, sameHOTEL_NAME placeholder. No re-work needed.

The attribute is set once and used across every message that needs it. You don't re-segment your list or manage separate broadcast groups. The personalisation is handled automatically.

Get Started

Guest Attributes are available in Weddingkart on all plans. If you already have a guest Excel file with extra columns — hotel name, pickup point, bus group — the data is one upload away from being usable in personalised WhatsApp messages.

Have questions about setting up Guest Attributes for your next wedding? WhatsApp us at +91 92176 10045 — we're happy to walk you through a setup for your specific event.