About Trade Show Exhibit News

Trade Show Exhibit News covers the part of the trade show industry that nobody writes about: what it actually costs to put a booth on a floor, who is allowed to touch it once it’s there, and how the thing gets built in the first place.

That sounds narrow. It isn’t. Those questions decide most of an exhibitor’s budget, and the answers are unusually hard to find.

Why this publication exists

If you want to know what drayage costs at a specific convention center, or whether you’re permitted to plug in your own monitor, or why your graphics deadline is six weeks before a show that hasn’t sold out yet — you will find plenty of pages that gesture at an answer and almost none that give you one.

The page currently ranking first on Google for trade show labor costs by city contains no dollar figures at all. Its comparison table uses dollar-sign icons. The best document in the industry on union jurisdictions is a PDF that still refers to a convention center renamed in 2019 and a stadium demolished in 2008.

Meanwhile, the publications that ought to be answering these questions have gotten quieter, not louder. We think there’s a straightforward reason for that, and we’d rather say it plainly than pretend otherwise.

Who publishes us

Trade Show Exhibit News is published by Exhibit Experience, which builds and rents trade show exhibits and operates installation crews in Las Vegas and Orlando.

That’s a commercial interest and we’re not going to hide it. We think it’s also the reason we can report on this subject at all. We’re not owned by a show organizer, and we don’t sell advertising to general service contractors — which means we can publish what material handling costs and who collects it.

Our editorial standards page sets out exactly how we handle that, what we won’t do, and how to tell us we got something wrong.

What we publish

The Cost Desk — What things cost, with sources. Drayage, labor rates by city, booth pricing, graphics, freight, tariffs.

The Floor — Union jurisdictions, exhibitor-appointed contractor rules, move-in and move-out, and what you may and may not do in your own space.

Materials — Aluminum extrusion, tension fabric, wood, large-format print, LED. How exhibits are actually built.

The Business — Acquisitions, exhibit house economics, and where the industry is heading.

The Show Calendar — Dates, venues, move-in schedules, labor rules and cost context for every major show in North America, plus the international shows American companies exhibit at. Every date is verified against the organizer’s own published information, and every show page shows when it was last checked.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. When we do, we’ll fix it and say what changed. If you’ve spotted something — or you have a service manual, a rate sheet or an invoice that contradicts what we’ve published — please write to editor@tradeshowexhibitnews.com. Documents can be treated in confidence.