The state of Illinois recently passed a new law regarding exhibitor rights at McCormick Place. This has been a long time coming and attempts to even the playing field so that trade shows keep leaving Chicago for greener pastures throughout the country. Many of our current and prospective clients, especially those from out of the country, have questioned why they cannot join our company on the trade show floor based on the expanded exhibitor rights area of the new ruling.

Here is the reality . Some of the new rules, especially crew sizes from show management, outsourcing electrical for best pricing and outsourcing food services are hands down winners. If you own your exhibit you can go through the attempt of bringing in ladders, coordinating with the riggers, dock foremen, electrical services, and the like by yourself – but this can be overwhelming on the show floor. As an exhibit owner you can work with your I&D company, show prices should reflect the new ground rules at McCormick with lower pricing, and have a more stress-free installation and dismantle experience.

If you are renting an exhibit, and here I am strictly speaking for Absolute Exhibits, we would never send our equipment to the show floor without our crew to do the setup. Our rental prices always include installation and dismantle. We have a crew that is familiar with our equipment and can set everything in place at a much faster pace than anyone else. Also, this is our equipment and if someone not in our crew breaks something, drops something, cannot place AV equipment – well that would not be our responsibility. This is pretty simple and straight forward. While it seems that sending over a crew of your employees will save you money – in the long run it definitely will not. Our people build exhibits every day. They wire electrical through our walls, we lay carpet and pad and make appropriate cuts for wiring, we bring the refrigerator and hang the plasmas. Before show opening we clean and prep everything with cleaning supplies we send in with our gang box. None of those incidentals would be handled for you – and you would have people running around in cabs picking everything up or going to the service desk and paying incredible rates for minor things like an extension cord – that again we would have in our gang box at no charge.

Building exhibits is a time-crisis issue. We attempt to stay within straight time for our clients, unless move-in/move-outs are scheduled on the weekend. We figure all of this into your pricing. Additionally, unless you want to put three or four people up at a hotel during the show, or they can also serve as sales people in your exhibit space – you have additional costs waiting to take the exhibit down. All in all if you are an exhibit owner, you may have quite a bit to ponder. However, if you are a renter from Absolute Exhibits – the deal is sealed with your signed contract, there are no estimated costs. Absolute Exhibits takes the risk – you never get charged for additional hours spent on the show floor for your rental.