The next trade show is quickly approaching. Your company is excited about your exhibit, but do you know the best and cheapest way to get your booth to the show site? There are two ways to get your exhibit to the venue. Shipping directly to the show or shipping to advance warehouse. Advance warehousing is simply temporary staging in a designated warehouse where your exhibit can be stored. Advance warehouses are show specific and generally start accepting shipments up to 30 days in before the show opens and stop 7 days before target install dates.
Shipping early saves your company time and gives you piece of mind.
The benefits of shipping direct to advance warehouse include:
- Minimizes confusion for show organizers and decorators.
- Allows for more organized and timely way for freight (exhibit materials) to get to designated show sites
- Decreases install time and cost: if you ship to advance warehouse you won’t be waiting around for your crates to arrive to start install.
- You pay by the hour if your truck has to wait in the marshaling yard, to drop at show site, which could be hours. A marshaling yard is a designated lot where trucks gather for orderly dispatch to the show site. When shipping to advance warehouse, you don’t have to worry about this charge or loss of time.
- Shipping advance gives you time to confirm all your items have arrived.
Shipping direct to the show floor can cost more, in some cases up to three times as much, due to carrier wait times and target install delays. If your items do not arrive in a timely fashion, you could have to change your labor call, resulting in cancelation fees and higher charges for Saturday work. Keep in mind, every labor call has a four hour minimum, whether you use them or not. There is however one advantage to shipping direct: the items needed for your exhibit are handled less by the show decorators. There are also some items that advanced warehouse will not accept, pad wrapped items and machinery.
Shipping to advance warehouse gives you time to concentrate on all the other last minute details of participating in a trade show. Partnering with a great full-service face-to-face marketing company like Apple Rock frees up your time to focus on the important aspects like ROI — positioning you as the qualified #leadchamp in your office.