Exhibitor Field Guide The services manual is a rate card with deadlines
The services manual is a rate card with deadlines
The exhibitor services manual reads like paperwork. It is actually the price list for half your show budget, and every page of it has a countdown attached.
Sixty to ninety days before the show, the organizer or the general services contractor publishes the exhibitor services manual — a bundle of order forms, rules, and rates covering everything you will need inside the building. The correct way to read it is not as a reference to consult when problems arise. It is a rate card, and the prices on it change on fixed dates.
Advance price versus floor price
Nearly every service has two prices: the advance price, available until a deadline typically two to four weeks before move-in, and the floor price for orders placed after the deadline or on site. The floor price commonly runs thirty to fifty percent higher — the exact spread is printed on each form, so this is not speculation, it is arithmetic you can do the day the manual appears. The mechanism is simple: advance orders let the contractor schedule labor and inventory; floor orders are fulfilled from whatever and whoever is left, at a premium.
The discipline that follows: the day the manual is published, someone on your team reads it end to end, extracts every deadline into one dated list, and places every predictable order at advance rates. The first-show checklist provides the skeleton for that list.
What is in the manual
Electrical. Power is ordered by outlet, amperage, and location. Know your equipment's real draw before ordering; under-ordering means a floor-priced upgrade mid-setup. If power must reach the middle of the booth, cords under carpet are laid by the electrical contractor's crew before carpet goes down — a sequencing fact that surprises people on move-in day.
Rigging. Hanging anything from the ceiling is contractor-only work, ordered in advance with drawings, as covered in booth design.
Cleaning. Booth vacuuming is a separate paid service; aisle cleaning does not include your space. If you want clean carpet each morning, it is a line item.
Internet. Venue internet is ordered from the venue or its exclusive provider, priced per connection or device. The show floor's cellular capacity degrades as ten thousand people arrive; anything mission-critical — payment terminals, live demos — should run on ordered wired service, not hope.
Furniture and carpet. Rentable from the GSC at advance rates, or shipped in at drayage cost by weight. Run the comparison per item; the answer differs for a heavy counter and a light stool.
Material handling. The drayage rate card itself, plus target dates and warehouse addresses, lives here too.
Union jurisdictions: what you may do yourself
In most major US convention cities, work inside the hall is divided among trade unions, and jurisdiction — which union does which task — is defined per building and per contract. Electrical work belongs to electricians. Rigging belongs to riggers. Freight and forklifts belong to the teamsters and the material handling crews. Booth assembly beyond a stated threshold belongs to installation and dismantle labor.
What you may typically do yourself is defined by an exhibitor rights clause in the manual, and it commonly allows full-time employees of your company to set up a booth that one or two people can assemble in a limited time — often stated as thirty minutes to an hour — without tools, or with hand tools only. Beyond that, you hire labor by the hour, at straight time or overtime depending on when your target window falls. Weekend and evening move-ins are billed at overtime rates, which is a reason to look at your target date, in shipping and drayage terms, before assuming labor costs.
Do not improvise here. Plugging in your own extension cord or borrowing a hand truck in the wrong building creates a jurisdictional problem that stops work at your booth. Read the labor pages of your specific manual, and when in doubt, ask the service desk — the rules are the rules of that building, not of trade shows in general.
The one-hour rule of thumb
Before signing anything, run this test: take your booth concept and price it through the manual — power, carpet, cleaning, labor, drayage estimate — at advance rates, then again at floor rates. The gap between those totals is the price of disorganization, and it is the most controllable number in your entire budget.
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