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For a 200-guest Indian wedding, the realistic number is somewhere between 40 and 55 rooms, not 100. The gap comes from three things people forget to subtract: local guests who don't stay over, families who share a room instead of each guest taking one, and children who don't count against a room's capacity.
Two hundred guests on a list is not two hundred people looking for a room. A large share of most Indian wedding guest lists lives in the same city as the venue, or close enough to drive home after the sangeet. For a hometown wedding, that can be most of the list. For a destination wedding four states away, it might be almost none. As a starting point you should adjust for your own guest list's actual geography, assume half the 200 are local: 100 people who need a room, 100 who don't.
Those 100 out-of-town guests don't arrive as 100 separate bookings. They arrive as a mother and father, a couple with two children, three cousins sharing a car, a single aunt travelling alone. A reasonable average across a typical wedding's mix is a little over two people per travelling household, somewhere in the 2.2 to 2.6 range. At 2.3 people per household, 100 guests works out to roughly 43 households, not 100.
Hotel rooms used for a wedding block usually sleep two adults comfortably, which is also the default room capacity assumed when nobody specifies otherwise. A household of two adults and one child still needs one room, because the child shares the existing bed or an extra mattress the hotel adds, not a room of their own. A household of five, or an elderly relative who wants to be alone, needs more than one. Weighing the small households against the larger ones, 43 travelling households land close to 45 to 50 rooms at double occupancy.
The mistake most families make is dividing the guest count by two and stopping there: 200 divided by 2 is 100, so book 100 rooms. That number assumes every guest is out-of-town and every guest needs an individual bed, and it's wrong on both counts, which is why it lands at roughly double the honest figure of 45 to 50.
This arithmetic is only useful for the first phone call to a hotel, before anyone has actually committed to the wedding. The accurate number is never calculated from a guest count; it's reported. Each family says how many rooms it needs when it RSVPs, and rooms get assigned against that real number, not an estimate, with bigger families seated first and a hotel's rooms kept together by side wherever possible.
This is exactly how room assignment works inside ShaadiMode: a household states its room count on RSVP, and the room planner suggests assignments against real hotel inventory, flagging any household it couldn't fully fit rather than guessing.
The 45 to 50 figure above is a peak-night number: how many rooms are occupied at once, on the single busiest night of the wedding, usually the main ceremony or the reception. It is not the same as how many room-nights the wedding needs in total. A four-day wedding might have 50 rooms full on the wedding night and only 30 full on the haldi two days earlier, because some guests arrive late and some leave early. Hotels quote a block against the peak number, not the average, because that's the number of rooms they have to hold open regardless of who's actually sleeping there on the lighter nights.
Most families get this wrong in both directions. Book the peak number for every night of the block and you pay for empty rooms early in the week. Book the average instead and you run out of rooms on the one night everyone actually needs one. The honest way to plan is to work out the peak night specifically, and negotiate the lighter nights separately, rather than pricing the whole block against a single flat number.
If you're estimating this before RSVPs are in, ShaadiMode's rooms tool takes the real numbers as they arrive and does the assignment for you, peak night included. See how room assignment works
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