A booth fee is the price an exhibitor pays for a booth at one of your events. An add-on product is an extra they can buy with the booth, such as electricity, a lead scanner, or extra badges. Both use the same price and accounting settings as other products your Rhythm account sells. This article covers the exhibitor-specific settings, including the name shown in booth pickers, the description exhibitors see, and how to reorder, deactivate, or delete these records.
What It Controls
You set up booth fees and add-on products separately for each event, because each event owns its own exhibitor pricing. A booth fee is later mapped to one or more booth types on the exhibitor registration process that sells booths at that price. An add-on product is offered to exhibitors during checkout and can also be discounted by an event coupon.
Prerequisites
You need access to the event's setup pages. Exhibiting must be turned on for the event before the Exhibitors section appears on the setup menu, including the Fees and Add On Products pages inside it.
Where to Find It
Go to Meetings & Shows › Events › (the event) › Setup › Exhibitors › Fees to manage booth fees. Go to Setup › Exhibitors › Add On Products to manage add-ons. Each list shows the item's abbreviated name, status, and last changed date, with Create Booth Fee or Create Add On Product above the table.
- Booth fees appear in the order Rhythm returns them; there is no drag-to-reorder control.
- Add-on products can be dragged into a new order, and exhibitors see that order during checkout.
- A locked row has no edit or delete icon because it is protected from deletion by Rhythm staff, but you can still clone it.
- A row's options menu can include Financial Setup, which opens the accounting setup for that item. This option appears only for staff who have the separate financial setup permission for products.
- Booth fees appear in exhibitor registration only when the process form includes the booth selection component. If a booth-related fee stops appearing to exhibitors, check that the component is still on the form before you assume the fee is misconfigured.
If you report on booth fees through a query, the Exhibitors › Booths query and the Exhibitor Registration query both return the fee amount and fee identifier for a purchased booth.
The Settings
| Setting | Options | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Name (Abbreviated) | Any text | Empty | Required. This short name appears in booth dropdowns and pickers. Rhythm also builds a full name from it, <event name>/<abbreviated name>, which appears on product reports |
| Business unit and price fields | Depend on the business unit your account uses to sell the item | Your account's default | The standard fields every product uses to price the item and route its revenue |
| Bulk pricing rules | Quantity-based price breaks | None | Available for booth fees only; not offered for add-on products |
| Description (displays in portal) | Rich text | Empty | Shown to exhibitors on the Portal |
| Status | Active, Inactive | Active | Controls whether the fee or add-on can be chosen for a new booth or purchase |
| Deletion Protection | Locked, Unlocked | Unlocked | Shown only to Rhythm staff. When locked, the record cannot be edited or deleted from its list |
An add-on product record also stores minimum or maximum booth square footage and a priority-point range. In principle, those values could limit which exhibitors may buy the add-on. This form does not include controls for either restriction, so if one is set through something like an import, you cannot see or change it here. The restriction also has no effect here: every exhibitor is still offered the add-on regardless of booth size or points.
Warning
A purchase limit you set on a booth fee, such as one purchase for all time, applies per contact rather than to the booth type as a whole. It stops one exhibitor from buying the same booth fee twice, but it does not limit how many different exhibitors can each buy that fee. Do not use it as a substitute for true inventory control on a booth type that should have only one unit available.
Warning
If you choose a business unit after typing the abbreviated name, the record's identifier can end up in a format Rhythm will not accept, and the save is refused. If a new booth fee or add-on product will not save and the message points to the identifier, edit Name (Abbreviated) once more before saving again. Even a small change and change back regenerates a valid identifier from the name. The business unit can also affect what the identifier looks like when you edit the record, so the ID shown on the edit screen is not always the reliable one to use. If you need the fee or add-on's actual ID, for example to check it against an API result, hover over the hashtag icon for that row on the products list instead of reading it from the edit screen.
Tip
If an exhibitor registration process's booth fee picker used to show a long fee name cut off partway through, that has been corrected. The picker now widens itself when a fee's name is longer than usual, so the full name stays readable.
Dependencies and Precedence
- A booth names one booth fee for its price. Changing a fee's price or status does not change what an already-created booth stores, but it does change what a new booth with that fee costs.
- An exhibitor registration process that sells specific booth types maps each type to one of the event's booth fees. If you want a booth-related option to stop appearing in exhibitor registration entirely, remove its product from the process's Booth Type Fees mapping instead of leaving it mapped and only hiding the fee in the portal. A hidden fee that is still mapped can still appear in registration.
- A coupon can discount booth fees and exhibitor add-on products for one event. A coupon tied to a booth fee discounts each booth individually, so a purchase of several booths gets the discount on each booth rather than on the combined total. If you want one fixed discount applied to the whole multi-booth order instead, create the coupon in the Orders module rather than on the booth fee.
- The event's credit card processing fee percentage is set on the event itself, in its own Processing Fee field, not by adding a percentage to a miscellaneous product here. A miscellaneous product used for processing fees is a supporting record alongside that event setting, not where the percentage itself lives. If you want to include a processing fee on some invoices and not others, such as for pay-later registrations, one option is to create a bundled product that combines the event fee and the processing fee, then offer that bundled option in the Console for invoices you create before payment.
- Exhibitor booth fee types can each have their own confirmation email, configured in the event's Setup › Exhibitors › Fees area rather than in the general product confirmation message setup. This lets different booth types send different confirmation content.
- Rhythm does not directly support granting a variable number of free exhibitor badges based on how many booths an exhibitor buys, such as two free badges per booth with a charge for any more. Coupons, including separate coupons for different free-badge entitlements, are the usual way to approximate this.
- Add-on products and exhibitor contact management are separate. Adding more people to an exhibitor's booth through Exhibitor Contacts has no fee option of its own. If you want to charge for additional booth contacts, create an add-on product for it and add the extra contacts to the exhibitor's contact list separately.
- If your registration confirmation email lists an exhibitor's add-ons using a loop over the add-ons in the merge field browser, its example only shows generic placeholder property names, not real ones. Replace those placeholders with an actual add-on property, such as its name, before you save the template, or the loop will not show any add-on information.
- If exhibitors should be able to choose a marketing package alongside a booth but you cannot require an add-on, you can model each booth-and-package combination as its own booth option instead. Each option has its own booth fee, which effectively bundles the package into the booth choice.
Change Impact and How to Revert
- Renaming a fee or add-on is safe. Booths and processes refer to the record by its identifier, and the new abbreviated name appears everywhere at once.
- Deactivating a fee or add-on removes it from new selections without deleting it, so past booths and orders that already used it keep their record.
- Deleting a fee or add-on is intended to be blocked while a booth or add-on rule still refers to it. This is not confirmed to be enforced in every case, so check that nothing still points to the record before you delete it.
Permissions
You need the permission your Rhythm account grants for exhibitor booth fee and add-on setup. The Deletion Protection switch is visible only to Rhythm staff.
Validation and Errors
If you try to save a new booth fee or add-on without an abbreviated name, the form will not let you continue. If the record's identifier does not start with the event, the save is refused; see the warning above for the fix. Deleting a fee or add-on that other records still reference may also be refused, and the item stays in the list.