CES 2027 is scheduled for January 6-9, 2027, in Las Vegas, and exhibitors who treat the fall as setup season tend to have a calmer January than those who wait for the holidays to end. The show is large enough that small gaps compound: CTA’s audited figures for CES 2026, as reported in trade press, put attendance at 148,392 with more than 4,100 exhibitors. A booth that is not registered, powered, connected and ready to capture leads on the first morning is competing for attention with thousands of others that are.

This checklist covers the three areas where first-time and returning exhibitors most often lose time: people and badges, booth technology, and lead capture. It is not a substitute for the official exhibitor manual for your venue, which sets the actual deadlines and rates. Treat it as a way to decide what to ask for, and in what order.

Start With the Manual for Your Venue

CES is not one building. CTA publishes separate exhibitor manuals by venue, and the list on the CES exhibitor manual page includes ARIA, the Las Vegas Convention Center, Mandalay Bay, the Venetian exhibit suites, Venetian Expo and Fontainebleau, plus separate hospitality suite guides for several resort properties. Your booth location determines which manual governs your power, labor, internet and material-handling rules, so open the right one before you order anything.

Two details from that page are worth noting early. Material handling is billed per pound with a 100-pound minimum, and the listed advance and direct-shipping rates differ by venue: roughly $0.71 per pound at the convention center halls versus $1.16 at ARIA and the Venetian meeting rooms and exhibit suites. Small packages up to 30 pounds are listed as free. The page also says labor rates were expected to rise about 3 percent over CES 2026. Confirm all of this against the current manual, since rates are published there and can change.

Registration and Badges

Understand the allotment

CTA’s exhibitor benefits list five complimentary exhibitor badges for every 100 square feet of exhibit space, with a minimum of 10, plus up to 1,000 complimentary customer invitations and use of the Exhibitor Dashboard for pre-show promotion. Work out your badge count against your staffing plan before you start inviting people, because anyone beyond the allotment is a paid registration.

Route everyone through the dashboard

According to the CES 2027 hospitality suite guides, exhibitor personnel registration is handled through the Exhibitor Dashboard by a designated Registration Coordinator, who controls the company’s allotment and initiates registration for each person. The guides also warn that staff must register with the same email address the invitation was sent to; otherwise they are registered as Industry Attendees and asked to pay the standard pass fee. Collect the exact addresses first and send invitations to those, not to shared inboxes that staff will not use to register.

Use customer invitations deliberately

The same guides describe customer invitation promotion codes worth $149 off registration, valid through December 31, 2026. Decide which accounts and prospects deserve a personal invitation, and send those with a meeting request attached rather than as a bulk email.

Booth Technology

Booth technology orders are where deadlines and exclusivity rules hide. In the hospitality suite guides, Audio Visual Encore is named as the exclusive provider of audio-visual services for those suites, and show services are billed alongside electrical, phone and internet. Exhibit-hall rules differ by venue, so do not assume the suite arrangement applies to a floor booth. Ask CES Operations, listed on the manual page, if your manual is ambiguous.

Build the order list from the demo outward:

  • Power: Count every device that will run at once, including chargers and lighting, and order circuits to match. Underordering is a common reason a demo stalls on opening morning.
  • Connectivity: Decide whether the demo needs a dedicated wired line and whether any live data or cloud feature depends on it. Plan an offline fallback, such as a recorded walkthrough, for demos that cannot fail.
  • Display and AV: Confirm cable types and inputs for every screen and source device, and whether you may bring your own equipment or must rent. Our tradeshow AV checklist covers the gaps first-time exhibitors tend to miss.
  • Shipping: Compare advance and direct shipping, and note the per-pound minimum before deciding what to ship and what to carry.

Lead Capture

The CES exhibitor pages we reviewed do not state a lead retrieval product or order deadline, so look in your venue manual or ask CES Operations which scanning option applies to you. For a sense of the cost range at other shows, one 2026 association meeting listed handheld scanners at $495 early and $545 late, with app licenses at $350 and $400; CES pricing will differ.

Whatever the tool, settle these decisions before the show:

  1. What you will ask at the booth. CEIR’s 2012 study of 198 exhibitors, as summarized in secondary coverage, found that only 30 percent captured qualifying questions beyond contact details. Add two or three fields that let sales sort leads without a second conversation: purchase timeline, role in the decision, and product of interest.
  2. Where the data lands. Test the export into your CRM with a handful of fake scans, including a badge with unusual characters in the name, before you travel. Our look at bad lead data at tradeshows explains why those errors get expensive later.
  3. Who follows up, and how fast. Assign owners by territory before the show, and write the first-touch email now so it can go out the day after a conversation.
  4. How consent is handled. If you scan badges, know what the attendee agreed to at registration and what your team may do with the data.

CTA also warns that it does not sell the CES attendee list, so treat any email offering one as a scam. Trust only messages from CTA staff or the official vendors named in your manual.

Work the Sequence

The order matters more than any single task. Read the manual for your venue first, because it sets everything else. Then lock the badge list and send registrations, place the technology and shipping orders that carry advance pricing, and finish with a lead-capture rehearsal that runs from scan to CRM to follow-up email. If any step in that chain is untested when you board the plane, it will be tested for the first time in front of buyers. Industry bodies such as IAEE publish broader exhibitor planning guidance, but the venue manual and CES Operations remain the authority on your specific deadlines.