Sizing exhibitor guest pass allotment so the codes get used

Three weeks out, the exhibitor services inbox gets a request from a 2,000 square foot exhibitor. They are running a customer event on the Tuesday evening and need forty more guest codes.

The account already holds 200 codes issued at contract signature, of which eleven have been redeemed. Nobody in the conversation knows that, because the exhibitor portal shows the exhibitor guest pass allotment and not the redemption against it, and the show's own report on guest codes is produced once, after the event, and read by nobody.

The allotment is inventory, and most of it expires

A guest pass allotment is the cheapest audience acquisition channel an organiser has. The codes are handed to people who already sell into your buyer market, who have current customer lists, and who have their own commercial reason to fill your aisles. There is no media cost and no list rental.

It is also, at most shows, the channel with the worst utilisation, and the failure is silent. An unredeemed code produces no error, no alert and no line in a report. It simply does not become a registration, and the registration it did not become is invisible in exactly the way a media campaign that underperforms is not.

The first move is to treat the allotment as inventory with a redemption rate, which means two numbers instead of one: how many codes exist, and how many became registrations.

How do large shows size an allotment?

Large shows solve the sizing question in two quite different ways, and both are published.

The NACS Show's 2026 exhibitor registration rules allocate against area. Booth personnel badges are limited to three per hundred square feet of booth space at no cost, with additional booth personnel limited to a further two per hundred square feet, purchasable at 95 US dollars each until 5 October 2026 and 195 from 6 October. That is a hard ceiling of five badges per hundred square feet, half of them free and half of them priced. Customers are handled separately, through an invite a customer function that registers the guest at the member rate.

CONEXPO-CON/AGG's 2026 registration policy takes the opposite approach and allocates nothing. No exhibitor badges are included in the cost of the booth space, and all booth staff must wear a badge. Exhibitors who want to bring customers or dealers have two routes: buy the badges themselves at 89 US dollars during the early window, rising to 129 and then 179, or share a link carrying a unique discount so guests register and pay for their own badge, which the policy notes is at no cost to the exhibitor.

The two models answer different questions. The area model asks how many people a stand of that size can reasonably support. The price model asks how much each additional body is worth to the exhibitor. Neither one asks the question this post is about, which is how many guest registrations a given exhibitor is actually capable of producing.

Booth staff ratios per square metre are their own argument and belong to A32. What follows is about guests only.

Sizing against area, worked on 400 exhibitors

Take a show with 400 exhibitors and 81,000 net square feet, distributed the way most floors actually are.

250 exhibitors hold 100 square feet each, which is 25,000. One hundred hold 200 square feet, which is 20,000. Forty hold 400 square feet, which is 16,000. Ten hold 2,000 square feet, which is 20,000. That sums to 81,000 across 400 accounts.

Now set the allotment at ten guest registrations per hundred square feet, which is a common enough rule. The ceiling is 81,000 divided by 100, times ten, which is 8,100 guest registrations available across the floor.

Suppose 1,134 of them are redeemed. That is a redemption rate of 14.0 per cent, and 6,966 codes expire unused.

Look at where the ceiling sits before you look at the redemption. The ten largest exhibitors hold 20,000 square feet, so they hold 2,000 of the 8,100 codes. Two and a half per cent of the exhibitor base holds 24.7 per cent of the inventory. The 250 smallest exhibitors hold 2,500 codes between them, ten each.

Redemption is inversely related to allotment size

Split the 1,134 redemptions by exhibitor size and the design problem becomes obvious.

The 250 exhibitors at 100 square feet redeemed 520 of their 2,500 codes, which is 20.8 per cent. The 100 exhibitors at 200 square feet redeemed 300 of 2,000, which is 15.0 per cent. The 40 at 400 square feet redeemed 190 of 1,600, which is 11.9 per cent. The ten largest redeemed 124 of their 2,000, which is 6.2 per cent.

The smallest exhibitors, holding the fewest codes, redeem at more than three times the rate of the largest. That is not a surprise once stated. A small exhibitor with ten codes and one salesperson can name ten customers. A large exhibitor with 200 codes has a marketing department, a separate event budget, its own customer event on the Tuesday evening, and no individual whose job is to distribute your codes.

So allocating by area puts a quarter of the inventory in the hands of the group least likely to use it, and the shows that do this then report a floor-wide redemption rate that averages two very different behaviours into one number nobody can act on.

The corollary is uncomfortable for the sales team. Guest pass allotment is frequently sold as a benefit of a larger stand, which means it is priced into the contract, which means the codes are notionally paid for. If the large accounts redeem at 6.2 per cent, the benefit they bought is mostly not being delivered, and they have not complained because they never counted it either. That contractual half is one of the four fields a comp entitlement needs, which is A17's document rather than this one's.

Size against demonstrated redemption instead

I would allocate against what the account did last time, with a floor and a stated route to more.

Give every exhibitor a floor of ten codes regardless of size, since ten is small enough to cost nothing and large enough to be worth a mailing. Above the floor, give each returning account twice what it redeemed at the previous edition. Give new accounts the floor plus an allowance based on the median redemption of accounts of similar size.

Run that over the numbers above. The 1,134 redemptions become an entitlement of 2,268, plus floors for the accounts that redeemed under five, so a ceiling somewhere around 3,000 rather than 8,100. Redemption against that ceiling would land near 38 per cent on unchanged behaviour, which is a rate you can set a target against and improve.

The objection is that a smaller ceiling caps upside, and it would if the ceiling were fixed. Publish the top-up rule instead: an exhibitor who redeems 80 per cent of an allotment gets more within two working days, no approval needed. That converts the allotment from a static grant into something closer to a credit line, and it moves inventory towards the accounts demonstrating they can use it.

Doubling last edition's redemption is arbitrary and I would defend it only as a starting point. The principle it encodes is the part worth keeping, which is that entitlement should follow demonstrated capability rather than square footage.

What makes a code get used?

Sizing is half the problem. The other half is that most guest codes are delivered in a form nobody can act on.

The common failure is a code in a PDF, inside an exhibitor manual, emailed eleven months before the show, to whoever signed the contract. That person is frequently not the person who would send the invitation, and by the time the marketing manager is planning show activity in month nine, the manual is unfindable.

Four things change redemption more than any change to the allotment size. Deliver the codes as a ready-made invitation link the exhibitor can paste into their own email, rather than as a code to be typed. Deliver them again, twice, at the points where exhibitor marketing actually happens, which for most accounts is ten weeks and four weeks out. Show redemption in the exhibitor portal as a live count against the allotment, since a visible counter is the only feedback most accounts will ever get. And put the redemption count in the exhibitor's post-show report next to their scan numbers, because that is the document their management reads.

None of that requires a new system. It requires the redemption number to exist somewhere the exhibitor can see it, which on most shows it does not.

Where this stops

Redemption is not attendance. A code that becomes a registration has done its job as far as this measurement goes, and the person still has to show up. Guest registrations from an exhibitor's customer list often skew local and free, which is the combination with the weakest turnout, so a show that improves redemption by ten points and reports it as audience growth may be reporting less than it thinks. The paid and free turnout comparison in A16 covers the correction, and where the redeemed guests land in the type mix report is A31's.

The harder limit is attribution. A customer invited by an exhibitor is frequently a customer who would have registered anyway, since they are already in that exhibitor's orbit and often in your own database from a prior edition. Counting every redemption as an incremental registration overstates the channel, sometimes badly. The check is to match redeemed guest registrations against your prior edition file and report the share that is genuinely new to the show, which is the only version of the number worth putting in a channel comparison.

And a floor-wide redemption rate hides everything that matters, since it averages a 20 per cent group and a 6 per cent group. Report it by exhibitor size band or do not report it.

Pull last edition's guest code data this week and put two columns next to each exhibitor account in your attendee analytics extract: codes issued and codes redeemed. Sort by the difference. The accounts at the top of that list are holding the inventory, and a phone call to five of them will tell you whether the problem is the size of the allotment or the way it was delivered. If one account near the top of the list is redeeming far more than it was issued, that is a leak rather than a sizing problem, and A19 has the tests.