Trade Show Registration: Visitor, Exhibitor and Press Flows in One Event

A trade show needs three registration flows, not one: a visitor form, an exhibitor staff form and a press form, each with its own questions, capacity and badge. In eventcloud that means one ticket group per audience, secret links for the groups you do not want strangers finding, and badges printed from the answers people actually gave.

Why Does One Registration Form Fail at a Trade Show?

Because the three crowds want different things and you need different facts from each. A visitor should say what they buy and how they heard about the show. An exhibitor's staff member must be tied to a company. A journalist needs a media badge and a short walk past the queue. Squeeze all three onto one form and you get a page of "if you are an exhibitor, skip to question 14" instructions, which is how a form earns the reputation of a tax return.

The cleaner model is one form per audience. eventcloud calls the audience a ticket group (the attendee type), and every group carries its own form: text, dropdown, single and multiple choice, date, country, phone, address, a Terms agreement, section headings and page breaks. Answers flow to the badge, the PDF ticket, the confirmation email, the attendee list and the Excel export, matched by question, so renaming or translating a question halfway through the campaign does not break the badge.

That single design choice also sets up the rest of the show: capacity is set per ticket type and for the event as a whole, so a hall with a fire limit and a press area with twelve seats can both be enforced at the form.

What Does the Visitor Flow Need?

It needs to be quick, honest about price, and tied to a badge that will print the right company name. Visitor registration is the front door of the show, and most trade fairs run it free or at a modest charge that steps up as the show gets closer. Stacked price windows handle that: early bird, standard and door prices switch themselves on the dates you set, and a visitor who bought early keeps the price and VAT treatment they paid.

Two practical notes. First, eventcloud does not offer registration on a live event without a connected Stripe account, even when every ticket is free, so connect Stripe before you publish rather than on launch morning. Second, if you already hold a pre-registration list from last year's show or a partner association, attendee import reads Excel or CSV, checks every row before writing anything and sends emails only if you choose. It handles up to 50,000 rows and 20 MB, and it works on published events only, so it is not available in the free trial.

Visitors can also sign in to the attendee portal with an emailed link to download their tickets and edit their own answers, which takes a surprising number of "I typed my employer wrong" emails off your inbox. If you run a multi-day show, your exhibitor and visitor questions can include which days they plan to attend, which is far more useful for hall planning than a headcount.

How Do Exhibitor Staff and Press Register Without a Public Page?

Through private ticket groups. A private group is reachable only by a secret link, so exhibitor staff passes and press passes never appear on the public registration page. You send the link to each exhibiting company, they send it to their team, and each person completes the form with their own email address and the company details the badge needs. For more on running exhibitor and sponsor passes apart from the public, see how to collect sponsor and exhibitor registrations separately from attendees.

The secret link is the gate. It is not an approval workflow. Coming soon: approval and invite-only registration.

Until then, press credentials work the way they always have at the best shows: someone on your team checks the request, then sends the link. On paid passes, promo codes restricted to named email domains can add a second lock.

Capacity is set per ticket type, so a limit caps the exhibitor group as a whole, not each company. If you allocate passes by stand size, say so in the exhibitor guide and check the attendee list before the show. Up to 99 of one ticket type can go on a single order line, which suits an exhibitor registering a whole stand team at once.

What Happens at the Door?

The badge is printed from the registration answers. The badge designer works in real millimetres, and any registration question can appear on it, so company name and visitor type can be driven by the form. For walk-up printing, the self-service Badge Kiosk is a laptop with a printer beside it: a visitor types their ticket number (the nine-digit number on every ticket), checks the badge, corrects the printed details if you allow it, and prints. Printing checks them in. The kiosk does not register or charge walk-ins, and it has no camera scanning, so decide in advance how you handle the person who turns up without a ticket.

The staffed side is check-in on any phone or tablet. Staff open one link, enter a 4-digit PIN, and find a ticket by scanning the QR code or typing the ticket number. The screen shows name, email, phone, company, ticket and pass type, flags repeat scans, and refuses refunded and unpaid tickets. The honest limits matter on a show floor. eventcloud's phone check-in does not work offline, so test the signal at every entrance during build-up. It has no search by name, company or email, and it never prints, because printing runs through the kiosk only. Coming soon: check-in search by name, company or email for door staff. The badge printing and check-in pages describe both in full: badge printing and the Badge Kiosk and phone check-in.

How Do Exhibitors Collect Leads from the Same Registration?

Lead retrieval comes with every seat: exhibitors scan attendees with their own phones, rate and qualify each lead, and export their leads to Excel. They scan the QR code on each attendee's badge or in their event app, rate each lead from 1 to 5, answer up to 10 questions the rep writes, add notes, and keep scanning through a signal drop, because captures queue on the phone for up to 30 days. The morning after, the rep gets a leads email. No charge from us per scanner or per lead. You decide whether exhibitors get it with their pass or buy it at checkout for a price you set.

A scan is not consent. What a scan shares is the registration answers you choose to share, which by default are first name, last name and email, and a visitor who walks past a stand has agreed to nothing more than that. Say on the form that exhibitors may scan visitors, let visitors see which companies scanned them through Who Scanned Me, and remind exhibitors that a scan is the start of a conversation, not permission to enrol someone in a newsletter. As the organiser you see totals only, never the contents of an exhibitor's leads. There is no CRM sync, so each rep keeps their own Excel list.

How Do the Platforms Compare for a Trade Show?

Compare what you are charged per registration, how exhibitors capture leads, and where each tool stops. Figures below are published or reported amounts, last checked on 28 October 2026, and they are not a recommendation for any show size.

Sources: InEvent on Cvent pricing, Docket on Cvent pricing, Vendelux on Cvent lead capture and Eventbrite's organiser pricing. The first three are competitors of Cvent describing its model, so treat the numbers as reported, not quoted.

For the overall picture of how eventcloud handles exhibitions, the trade shows and exhibitions page sets it out.

Who Is This Not For?

eventcloud does not sell stand space or draw floor plans. If the revenue of your show is stand sales, you need exhibitor management software alongside registration, and the company name will arrive in our exhibitor staff form as an answer, not as a booking.

eventcloud has no conditional form logic yet. If your visitor form depends on branching questions, use a separate form per ticket group. And a per-ticket platform such as Eventbrite's costs less below a few hundred paid tickets a year, so a small, one-off fair may be better served there.

Your next step is small: list your three audiences, write down the five facts you need from each, and check each fact would fit on a badge. If it will not fit, it probably belongs in the Excel export, not on the form.