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SHOW SERVICES · THE OTHER INVOICE · BUDGET GUIDE
Your booth has a fixed price. The show floor doesn’t. Drayage, electrical, rigging, internet, and cleaning are billed by the show’s contractors at rates set per event — outside every exhibit house’s contract, including ours. We explain each one, estimate all five in your quote, and put every deadline on your schedule.
THE FIVE, IN ONE PLACE
Each page below walks one service end to end — how it works on the floor, a worked cost example, the mistakes that cost real money, and how we handle it. Example totals shown are from a 20×20 reference booth:
The general contractor’s fee to move your freight from their dock to your booth, store the empty crates, and reverse it all at move-out — billed by weight. The biggest of the five, and the most misunderstood.
Watch the animated route →Power is ordered by the outlet and the drops are laid under your carpet before flooring goes down — with union electricians making the connections in some cities. The floor plan and the advance deadline decide everything.
See how power orders work →Only venue riggers touch the ceiling — and one threshold rules the budget. Under 150 lbs with no electrical, a sign flies from the hoists for roughly $3–4K; cross that line and it hangs from truss with engineered safety points at $20K–$60K+.
See where the truss line sits →Sold exclusively by the venue’s telecom provider, and wireless routers are not permitted. A shared-bandwidth wired line runs ~$1,300; dedicated bandwidth starts near $4,000 and passes $20,000 at 100Mbps — sized by what can’t fail on day one.
See the bandwidth ladder →The show vacuums the aisles; nobody vacuums your booth unless you order it. Per square foot, billed on your full footprint — the smallest cost on this page and the most commonly forgotten.
See the aisle/booth line →WHERE WE COME IN
We can’t fix these prices — nobody honestly can — but we can make sure you never meet one of them for the first time on an invoice.
Your proposal includes a show-services estimate built from your booth’s real weight, power load, sign, connectivity needs, and footprint — alongside the fixed price of the booth itself.
Advance-rate deadlines for all five services go into your project schedule, working backward from the show — so the cheaper rate is always the rate you pay.
Power maps, rigging plots, connectivity specs, cleaning orders — the drawings and forms these services need are produced from your actual booth design, complete on day one.
Our crew labels your empties for the GC, tests every connection during move-in, and closes install with the pre-opening vacuum on the order — the services get used, not just bought.
STILL WONDERING
Because no exhibit house controls them. Each is billed by the show’s general contractor or a venue-exclusive provider, at rates published per show in the exhibitor manual — they change event to event and city to city. Any vendor who claims to include them at a fixed price is either padding heavily or planning a change order. We do the honest version: estimate all five in your quote from your booth’s real weight, power load, sign, connectivity, and footprint.
As a working rule from the labeled examples on these pages, a 20×20 demo booth with a simple hanging sign might see roughly $14,700 across all five — with drayage alone usually half or more of it. Your real number depends on your booth’s weight, this show’s rate cards, and whether you hit the advance deadlines. That’s exactly what the show-services estimate in our quote pins down.
Drayage and usually rigging and cleaning go to the show’s general contractor; electrical and internet typically go to venue-exclusive contractors. All of them invoice you directly through the show’s ordering portal — which is why they sit outside your booth contract, and why the deadlines live in the exhibitor manual.
Missing advance deadlines. Every one of these services has a lower advance rate and a higher floor rate for the same thing — order late and you can pay 25–50% more across the board. Second place: shipping direct to show site when an advance warehouse was available, and gambling your first install day on a dock queue.
We plan and estimate all five in your quote, put every advance deadline on your project schedule, produce the floor plans and rigging drawings the orders require, and coordinate on site — our crew labels your empties, tests your connections, and closes install with the day-one vacuum on the order. The invoices themselves come from the show’s contractors, with no markup passing through us.
NO SURPRISE INVOICES
Fixed pricing on the booth. Honest estimates on the five costs nobody can fix. Every deadline on one schedule. That’s the whole pitch.
PREFER TO TALK? (800) 379-8451 · INFO@PUREXHIBITS.COM
