Exhibitor Field Guide About this guide
About this guide
A short page on who writes this, why, and what we will and will not do to keep it worth reading.
The Exhibitor Field Guide is an independent editorial project about the mechanics of exhibiting at US trade shows. It is written for the marketer or founder who is planning a booth without an exhibit house on retainer — the person who will personally read the services manual, sign the freight paperwork, and staff the floor.
What we publish
The guide covers the machinery of exhibiting: how shows sell space, how material handling billing works, what union jurisdiction means for your setup day, where the deadlines hide, and which documents contain the real numbers. It does not publish design inspiration, vendor rankings, or marketing tactics. Plenty of places do that. Almost nowhere explains why the drayage invoice looks the way it does, so that is the gap this site exists to fill.
Editorial policy
No sponsorship, no paid placement. No company has paid to appear in this guide, to be linked from it, or to be omitted from it. There are no affiliate relationships, no sponsored pages, and no advertorial. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page and on the affected pages, prominently.
No invented numbers. Trade show costs vary enormously by show, city, building, and year. Rather than publish figures that would be wrong for your show, the guide explains what drives each cost — weight, timing, labor rules, deadlines — and points you to where your real number lives: your show's exhibitor services manual, its rate card, its contracts. Where the guide cites percentages or thresholds, they describe common industry structures, and your manual overrides them.
External links are load-bearing. When we link out, it is to primary authorities — regulators, standards bodies, government trade resources — that we have verified, not to whoever ranks well this month.
Corrections. Show rules change and buildings differ. If you find something on this site that contradicts your show's published rules, your show's rules win — and we would like to hear about it so the page can be improved.
No connection to prior publications on this domain
This site has no connection to any publication previously operated on this domain. The Exhibitor Field Guide is a new and unrelated project, and nothing published here before its launch reflects its editorial policy or its authorship.
Who publishes this
The publishing organization is Exhibitor Field Guide. The project is run as an editorial site, not as a lead generator for any exhibit house, contractor, or show organizer, and the people who write it have no financial stake in whether you exhibit more or less — only an interest in you doing it with your eyes open.
Contact
Questions, corrections, and suggestions for pages that should exist: [email protected].
We read everything. We especially want to hear about the gap between what this guide says and what happened on your show floor, because those gaps are where the next revision comes from.
How to use the site
If you are new here, the home page lays out the reading order, and the short version is: start with choosing a show if you have not signed, and with the first-show checklist if the show is already close. Every page is written to stand alone, so arriving in the middle via a search engine — which is how most readers get here — leaves you no worse off than starting at the top.
Published