How to Collect Wedding Guest Contact Details in the Philippines

Most guides on this were written for mailed invitations, so they ask for one thing: the street address. If your invitation goes out as a link, the address is the field you need least. The one you cannot do without is a mobile number that reaches the person, and for the parents' side of your list, expect those numbers to come from your parents. This page covers the fields worth asking for, five messages to paste, how Philippine number formats behave in the app, and how to import the result without retyping.

Which fields you actually need

Collect the fields you will use. Every extra question lowers the reply rate, and a field nobody fills in still has to be cleaned.

Field	Ask for it from	Why it earns its place
Full name, spelled as it should appear	Everyone	The invitation, seat plan and check-in list all read from it
Mobile number	Everyone	For a digital invitation this is the delivery address
How many seats the invite covers	One person per household	Stops the count drifting once RSVPs start
Group: bride's side, groom's side, barkada, office	Everyone	Drives seating, batch sending and cuts if you overshoot
Email	Only guests hard to reach by chat	Office contacts, some overseas relatives
Postal address	Only guests getting a printed copy	Usually elders, principal sponsors, a few offices
Notes: diet, mobility, kids	Optional	Cheaper to capture now than to chase in the final week

Joy's address collector, built for mailed invitations, asks for the mailing address and lets guests share an email and phone number so the couple knows the best way to reach them (Joy). Keep that instinct and flip the priority: number first, address only where paper is going.

Ask once, in the channel they already use

Email is the wrong pipe here. Meltwater's 2026 round-up of Philippine social statistics puts Messenger at 90.6% of internet users, "acting as the country's preferred messaging app to keep in touch," and records that "97.8% of Filipino internet users go online via mobile phones" (Meltwater). Our advice: paste the request into a Messenger or Viber thread rather than an inbox. Send one message per household, not per person, and say what you need and by when.

First ask, one per household:

Hi Auntie! We're finally setting the guest list for our wedding on [date]. Could you send us the best mobile number for you and Uncle, and how many of you we should reserve seats for? A quick reply here is fine, no form needed. We're closing the list on [date] so we can send the invitations out.

When your mother hands over a list of names:

Mom, thank you! For each name, could you add the mobile number and how many people it covers? We can only send an invitation to someone we can reach.

One week later, only to households that have not replied:

Hi Auntie! Just checking that our message reached you. Could you send your mobile number and how many seats to reserve? We're closing the list on [date].

For a guest abroad:

Hi! Could you send your mobile number with the country code, for example +1 followed by the number, and the best chat app to reach you on? We'll send your invitation as a link.

After a phone call, to confirm the number:

Just confirming I have your number as [number]. Is that right?

Anything that takes more than one reply to answer will sit unanswered for a week. If you use a Google Form, keep it to the fields above and paste the link into the same chat thread.

Ask through households, not individuals

The duplicate you will actually get is one household submitting twice. Joy's advice is to send the request "to your primary point of contact to avoid duplicates of the same address on your guest list" (Joy), and it works just as well for numbers: one row per household, one contact number, one seat count.

Make it a rule that no name enters the list without a way to reach it. A name with no number becomes a printed invitation somebody has to deliver by hand, a cost decision you should make on purpose. If parents' names push you over your venue capacity, deal with the number first: how to cut your wedding guest list covers the order to cut in.

How Philippine number formats behave

Imbitasyon Ko stores a guest's number exactly as you type it, and rewrites it only when it builds the SMS, Viber or WhatsApp link: it strips every non-digit, then applies these rules.

You type	Link uses	Note
0917 123 4567	639171234567	Leading 0 becomes 63
917 123 4567	639171234567	Ten digits starting with 9 are read as a mobile with the 0 dropped
+63 917 123 4567	639171234567	Already international
0063 917 123 4567	639171234567	The 00 is dropped
(02) 8123-4567	63281234567	A Metro Manila landline: fine to store, but it cannot get a text or WhatsApp
+1 415 555 0100	14155550100	Other countries: digits only, so include the country code (the + is for your readability; the app strips it)
Fewer than 8 digits	No number	SMS opens with no recipient; WhatsApp opens its chat picker

So 0917 123 4567 and +63 917 123 4567 both work, and format matters less than being right. Two traps: a foreign number typed with a leading 0 is read as Philippine, and a wrong number of eight or more digits produces a link to a number that does not exist.

Which buttons need a saved number: the SMS and WhatsApp rows in the send panel switch to "No phone — copy message for Messenger" for a guest without one, while Viber and Copy work without a number. Messenger has no link that opens a chat addressed to someone else, and Viber opens a "forward to" screen rather than a pre-addressed thread. That is why the number still matters in a country that lives on Messenger: only SMS and WhatsApp use it directly.

Clean it before it becomes your guest list

What comes back	What it looks like	What to do
The same person twice	"Auntie Baby" in yours, "Ma. Bernadette Cruz" in your mother's	Match on number first, name second; keep the spelling you would print
One number, four formats	0917 123 4567, +639171234567, 917-123-4567	Pick one format and rewrite every row
A household counted twice	Husband and wife each replied, both with 2 seats	Merge to one row, seats set once
A landline where a mobile belongs	An 8-digit Metro Manila number	Flag it: that guest gets a call or a printed copy
A number that has changed	The message is never delivered	Confirm with the household contact before send-out

Move it in without retyping

Import a spreadsheet instead of copying row by row. Add Guests, then Import CSV reads four columns (name, group, phone and the seat count) and finds the header row by name. name,group,phone,pax works, and so does a file with no header as long as the columns sit in that order.

name,group,phone,pax
Ma. Bernadette Cruz,Bride's family,0917 123 4567,2
Engr. Rodel Santos,Ninong,+639181234567,2
Aira Domingo,College barkada,09221234567,1

Limit	Value	What happens if you exceed it
Guests per invitation	20 on Free; no cap on Standard or Premium	Existing guests count too. If they plus the new rows exceed 20, the whole import is rejected, not trimmed
Rows per import	500	Split a longer list into several files
Seats per guest	1 to 10	Out-of-range values are clamped; a blank or unreadable value becomes 2
Duplicate rows	Not merged	Every row is added as a new guest, so de-duplicate first

The export returns eleven columns: name, group, tags, phone, seat count, sent and opened flags, RSVP status, the people the RSVP confirmed, notes, and each guest's personal link. The spreadsheet can be rebuilt from the app at any point. Our guest list management guide has a 14-column template that maps onto this import.

Chasing the last of them

When	What to do
As soon as the list is final	Send the first ask, one message per household
One week later	Follow up only households that have not replied, in the same thread
Any time	Hand stubborn households to whoever knows them best: a sibling, the maid of honor, a parent
Two weeks before send-out	Call the remaining few; ask a relative for anyone unreachable
Send-out day	Anyone still without a number gets a printed copy or a phone call

Joy recommends starting "as soon as your guest list is finalized, or roughly four weeks before your first correspondence is mailed" (Joy). In our view, four weeks is comfortable for a digital send-out and tight for a printed one. Give the ask a closing date, because an open-ended request gets answered last. Numbers taken over the phone need one extra step: read the number back digit by digit before you hang up, because a transposed pair costs you the whole delivery. Once the numbers are in, how to share your digital invitation covers the per-guest links, and when to send wedding invitations covers the calendar.

Holding other people's contact details

You are keeping personal information about a few hundred people. The Data Privacy Act of 2012 defines a "personal information controller" and then excludes "[a]n individual who collects, holds, processes or uses personal information in connection with the individual's personal, family or household affairs" (RA 10173, Sec. 3(h)(2)). A couple building their own wedding guest list reads as inside that exclusion on the text of the provision. We have not found a National Privacy Commission ruling on wedding guest lists, so treat this as the wording of the law and not settled guidance.

Our advice is still not to be careless with the file: share the full sheet only with your coordinator and whoever runs the reception desk, send vendors counts instead of contact details, and delete working copies once the thank-you messages have gone out.

Collect the four fields, ask one person per household in the thread they already read, agree one number format, and import instead of retyping. The list you end up with is the one you will use for seating, the check-in desk and the messages afterward, so an hour of cleaning now saves you later.