---
title: "Inviting and Adding Guests to Your Event"
subtitle: "Learn how to easily send invites and the difference between adding and inviting guests."
slug: "inviting-and-adding-guests-to-your-event"
url: "https://help.luma.com/p/inviting-and-adding-guests-to-your-event"
---

You’ve created an event, great! Now you want to invite your friends, customers, or leads to join you at the event.

In Luma, we’ve built a powerful invite system so you can reach guests across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications. They can accept or decline the invite in one tap.

[![](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/40d05f0513d048aba2cd7f90c9a6c993-00001.gif)](https://www.loom.com/share/40d05f0513d048aba2cd7f90c9a6c993)

You can invite people from the website or the iOS app.

## Syncing Google Contacts

On web, you can connect your Google Account to sync over your Google Contacts to Luma. This makes it easy to quickly invite your Google contacts to your new event.

## iOS App

In the iOS app, you can sync your phone’s contacts to invite anyone in your contacts to your event.

If you sync over contacts, you’ll be able to invite people by phone number, if you don’t have their email. So this is a great way to send SMS invites to your friends.

## Filtering by Subscribers and Membership Tiers

When inviting guests, you can filter your audience to target specific groups:

- **All Subscribers** - Invite anyone who has subscribed to your calendar
- **Subscriber Tags** - If you’ve organized subscribers into tags, you can invite specific tags
- **Membership Tiers** - If you have [calendar memberships](/p/calendar-memberships), you can invite members of specific tiers

Hidden membership tiers will also appear in the invite flow if they have existing members, so you can still invite those members to events even after hiding the tier from new sign-ups.

## Sending Invites

When you send an invite, guests receive an email. If they’ve linked a phone number, they’ll also get an SMS or WhatsApp message, and if they have the Luma app, a push notification.

**What the invite contains**

Every invite includes:

- Event name, date, and location
- Host or calendar name
- Your custom invite message, if you added one
- An Accept Invite and View Event link

Invites don’t include the event cover image. Guests see the cover image when they tap through to the event page, and it also shows up in later emails like event updates, reminders, and registration confirmations.

The exact layout varies by channel — SMS and WhatsApp messages are shorter than the email, and push notifications just show a short title with a tap-through to the event.

If you’re importing a large list of emails, don’t worry about duplicates—Luma automatically skips anyone who is already on your guest list, whether they’re Going, Invited, Not Going, Waitlisted, or any other status. Only new people will receive an invitation.

Once an invite is sent, you cannot re-send it. Guests can use their original invite link or register directly from the event page.

If your event or ticket has Require Approval on, inviting guests will bypass this setting. Guests who register from an invite will be automatically approved.

## Adding Guests

You can also add guests directly to your event, bypassing registration and payment. This is a great way to add VIPs or people who have already opted into joining your event.

When adding guests:

- Guests will be marked as Going and receive a calendar invite
- You select which ticket type to add them with
- For new guests, they’ll receive that ticket type
- For existing guests, you can choose to either keep their current ticket or update them to the new ticket type

## Bulk Updating Ticket Types

If your event has multiple ticket types, the “Add Guests” feature is particularly useful when you need to change the ticket type for many existing guests at once. This commonly happens when:

- You need to upgrade a group of guests to VIP tickets
- You want to move guests from one ticket tier to another
- You’re consolidating ticket types and need to migrate guests

**To bulk update ticket types:**

Use the **Invite Guests** flow and paste in a list of guest email addresses (you can paste hundreds or thousands at once). Toggle on **Add guests directly to event** and select the new ticket type you want to assign. For existing guests, you’ll have two options:

- **Keep Tickets:** Keep the ticket types of existing guests
- **Update Tickets:** Update the ticket type to your selection

**Tips:**

- You can export your current guest list as a CSV from the Guests tab, filter it in a spreadsheet, and then paste the emails back in
- This process bypasses payment, so use it for comping tickets or administrative changes
- Guests will receive a calendar invite with their new ticket information