McCormick Place Exhibitor Survival Guide: Chicago Union Rules McCormick Place operates under 3 primary union jurisdictions: Teamsters (freight), IBEW (electrical), and IATSE (rigging). Exhibitors cannot unload trucks, run electrical, or hang overhead elements themselves. Drayage is billed per hundredweight (CWT) with minimums applied regardless of weight. Labor shifts to overtime before 8am and after 4:30pm […]
September 2026 Is About to Hit Hard — Here Are the 20 Trade Shows You Need to Plan For Now September is the cruelest month in the trade show calendar. You’re coming off the summer lull, your team is half-rested, and suddenly you’ve got four major shows stacking on top of each other across three […]
Three Out of Four Exhibitors Who Add a Social Media Wall Regret How They Planned It Not because the concept failed. The concept almost always lands well on the show floor. They regret it because they treated a social media wall trade show booth integration like a last-minute AV request instead of a systems deployment […]
7 Out of 10 Orlando Exhibitors Pick the Wrong Rental Vendor — Here’s How to Avoid Being One of Them You’ve done HIMSS at the Orange County Convention Center. You’ve navigated the OCCC’s notoriously tight move-in windows, dealt with Freeman on the dock, and watched a competitor’s booth go up crooked because their vendor sent […]
Real-Time Payments Are Table Stakes — So Why Is Your Money20/20 Booth Still Leading With Speed? Walk the floor at Money20/20 Las Vegas and count how many booths still have “instant payments” or “real-time settlement” as their headline graphic. Last year, I stopped counting at 34 before I hit the first cross-aisle. Every single one […]
George R. Brown Convention Center: What Every Experienced Exhibitor Needs to Know Before Houston OTC alone draws 60,000+ attendees and 2,200+ exhibiting companies to Houston every May. That’s not a trade show — that’s a full-scale land rush. And if you’re rolling into GRB without understanding how Houston operates, you’ll be paying for that education […]
Bigger Booths Always Get More Leads: And 7 Other Trade Show Myths We Need to Stop Repeating After managing logistics across 50+ shows — from CES at the LVCC to HIMSS at McCormick Place — I’ve watched smart, experienced event managers make the same expensive decisions based on the same bad conventional wisdom. These aren’t […]
Your Booth Builder Just Cancelled 3 Weeks Before CES. Here’s Exactly What You Can Still Do. It happens more than vendors will admit. A fabricator overcommits, a shipping container gets delayed, a key installer goes dark — and you’re left holding a signed contract and a booth space at the Las Vegas Convention Center with […]
Three Exhibitors at CES 2026 Spent $180,000 on Booths That Looked Identical to Their 2023 Setups — Here’s What Separated the Ones Who Got ROI The floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center doesn’t lie. You can spot a stale booth from 40 feet away — the backlit fabric wall, the floating product pedestals, the […]
If You’re Doing 4+ Shows a Year and Still Booking One-Off Rentals, You’re Paying a 25% Premium You Don’t Have To A thread in the IAEE community forums recently surfaced something most veteran exhibit managers already suspect but rarely quantify: exhibitors running four or more shows annually and treating each rental as a standalone transaction […]
