What is Trade Show Drayage and How to Avoid Getting Crushed on drayage charges at your next event
What Is Trade Show Drayage?
Drayage is the charge you pay for moving your freight from the loading dock of the convention center to your actual booth space — and then back to the dock when the show ends. That's the whole service. The stuff goes maybe 200 feet, sometimes even less depending on the size of the show. And yet for many exhibitors, it ends up being one of the biggest line items on the entire show budget, especially if you haven't planned for it.
What makes it especially frustrating is that it's not optional and it's not competitive. The trade show's general contractor — companies like Freeman or GES — has an exclusive contract with the venue. They are the only ones allowed to move freight on that show floor. Your shipping company drops off at the dock and walks away. Your own staff can't wheel a pallet to your booth. You have no choice but to use the official service, at whatever rate the official service decides to charge. We often joke about the term drayage being a mafia word made up by the labor unions, a charge so absurd that they invented a word for it.
The word "drayage" itself is actually ancient — it comes from the old English term for horse-drawn carts hauling goods short distances. The horses are gone. The bill, unfortunately, is not.
Why Does It Cost So Much?
A few things are happening at once.
That rate varies by city and venue but can easily run $100 to $200 per hundred pounds, and in expensive markets like New York, Las Vegas, or Chicago, it goes even higher. A medium-sized booth with a couple of crates and cases can hit 1,000 to 2,000 pounds before you know it.
Second, every shipment has a minimum weight charge — usually 200 pounds. Ship a single 40-pound box and you're paying for 200. Ship five separate small boxes and you're paying that minimum five times over.
Third, weights are always rounded up to the next hundred. A 310-pound crate gets billed as 400 pounds. That rounding adds up fast across multiple pieces.
And then there are the surcharges. Late arrival fees. Overtime fees if your freight gets handled outside standard hours. Special handling fees for anything uncrated, oversized, or awkwardly shaped. Each one piles onto the base rate. Trust when we say that the show wants you to ship late, and miss any early-bird deadlines they have offered you in leu of getting paid the premium.
The result is that exhibitors routinely get a final material handling invoice that's two or three times what they mentally budgeted — if they budgeted for it at all.
In short, to avoid drayage and material handling, try shipping goods directly to your hotel and carrying them in. Better yet, travel with your trade show booth and wheel it in yourself. Often times portable trade show displays have wheels are are made for easy transport in and out of the show with just a single person.
