A programme plan for the show where dealers choose the partners they will live with for years.
Every NADA cycle is worked backwards from one fixed point: the morning the expo opens in Orlando, Thursday, February 18. This guide maps the decisions that lock in first, the OCCC variables that change the plan, and the places programmes quietly lose money. The milestones below are calculated from this edition’s dates, so they move when the show does.
—weeks to expo morning, on a 30-week programme clock.
Nothing here is generic lead time. Each exit is placed against this edition’s expo date, and the one marked in black is where a NADA budget is won or lost. Open any milestone to see what slipping it actually costs.
The only window in which a NADA booth can still be anything. Spend it agreeing what the stand has to do in the twenty minutes it holds a dealer group — host them, show them their own workflow, get them somewhere private — before anyone draws a wall. The price is fixed here, before design starts.
Concepts get compressed into whatever can ship fastest, and the space you are assigned starts dictating the design instead of the other way round.
NADA reviews every booth drawing against its exhibit design regulations, and anything with a vehicle on it carries its own approval. In recent editions the floor-plan reporting deadline has fallen in late November; the service kit sets this edition’s date, and we file well ahead of it.
A drawing returned for changes in the new year is a redesign negotiated against production slots and floor-rate orders at the same time.
The graphic story, every screen’s content and every device that needs power or a network drop are confirmed as one decision, because each of them is also an order line with the show. Dealer-tech booths live or die on demos that work first time, so this is where the network plan gets written.
Every late screen becomes two late orders — the graphic and the circuit behind it — and the second one is the expensive one.
Electrical, network, material handling and rigging ordered at advance rates, calculated for the exact booth. For this edition that point falls in the last working days before the holiday break — the worst week of the year to need a signature — so we file before approvers leave, not after they return.
Every line still open is billed at floor rates. On a multi-station island with dedicated network for live demos, that spread is the single largest avoidable cost in a NADA budget.
For this edition, the hanging-sign request form and the sign’s layout and specs are due to show management by January 6. Rigging is scheduled from approved requests, so the sign is a paperwork deadline long before it is a fabrication one.
No approval, no sign — however good the one you built.
NADA runs a targeted move-in: each space has an assigned day, and freight has to land on it. For this edition, move-in into the halls opens Monday, February 15. We book the carrier and the dock window to your target, not to the first day the doors open.
Freight that misses its target day waits behind everyone else’s, and the install crew waits with it.
The whole booth stands on our floor, powered and lit, and you approve photographs of the real build — not a render — before it leaves for Orlando. Show week is then an install, not a discovery.
This is the step most programmes skip, which is why most booth problems are found on the show floor during move-in.
You arrive at handover to a booth that has already stood up once. Everything after this is conversations.
The NADA Show rotates host cities, and each move resets the things that drive a booth plan: hall layout, rigging rules, dock procedure, labour rules and how far your staff sleep from the floor. Last year’s drawings are a starting point, never a filing.
This edition runs in the Orange County Convention Center. Heights, sightlines and freight routes are planned for this hall and your assigned position, not carried over. Read the venue guide →
Material handling and cleaning run through the official contractor; utilities through the contractors named in the service kit. Setup can be done by your own full-time staff or a credentialed exhibitor-appointed contractor — we file the EAC paperwork and the COI.
Official housing opens with registration and the best-located blocks go early. Staff who sleep far from the hall lose time at both ends of every day, so we plan shift rotations around where your team actually stays.
The number you approve in the autumn is the number you pay. Design, fabrication, graphics, furniture, freight, installation, dismantle and project management sit in one fixed price, contractually — and every NADA booth we publish shows its Orlando price before you ever speak to us.
Tell us your footprint, your position on the floor if you have it, and how many dealer conversations the booth has to hold at once. Concepts and one fixed price come back within 24 hours, with what the show will bill you directly already calculated.
Or call us directly — (800) 379-8451
