Expo Insurance

Vendor or exhibitor insurance is a single company's booth-level general liability, bought to satisfy someone else's exhibitor kit. This page is the other side of that transaction: the organizer who wrote the exhibitor kit, leased the hall, hired the general service contractor, and has to hold the entire show together as one insured risk — including the exposure created by exhibitors who never send a compliant certificate.

Nearly every facility lease requires the organizer to name the venue as additional insured on a primary and non-contributory basis, waive subrogation in the venue's favor, and carry a minimum combined general liability limit — commonly $1M/$2M with $5M or more in umbrella coverage for larger halls. The lease's indemnification clause typically makes the organizer responsible for the facility's own defense costs arising from the show, regardless of fault, so the limit has to be sized against that clause, not against attendance alone.

Yes. Exhibitor policies protect the exhibitor's own booth liability; they do not step in for the aisles, the general session, the loading dock, the registration area, or any exhibitor who ships a defective or fraudulent certificate. The organizer's general liability, umbrella, and the general service contractor's own coverage form the layer that actually holds when an exhibitor's paper turns out to be worthless.

Most exhibitor manuals give the organizer the contractual right to deny floor access, require same-day binding of a compliant certificate, or place the exhibitor under the show's own contingent liability program until a fix is in hand. The costly failure is not having that clause, or having it but no staffed process to enforce it before the exhibitor's crew is already unloading crates in the aisle.

On projected lost revenue — booth sales, sponsorship, registration fees, and non-cancelable venue and vendor deposits — set against the named perils in the policy: adverse weather, venue unavailability, communicable disease where endorsed, terrorism, and non-appearance of a headline speaker or exhibitor. Multi-year, recurring shows with a stable attendance history rate more favorably than a first-time launch.

Contractually, both. The exhibitor's contractor typically submits the engineer-stamped structural plan, but the organizer's show management and the general service contractor jointly review and approve it, issue the rigging permit against the venue's own point-load limits, and inspect before doors open. An organizer that rubber-stamps double-deck submissions without an engineering review is retaining an exposure it thinks it transferred.

The lease and exhibitor kit obligations do not move with a change of GSC, so the organizer's own contract with the incoming contractor needs the same mutual indemnification, current certificate, and rigging jurisdiction language as the outgoing one, reviewed before the new contractor's crew is on the floor, not discovered mid-move-in when a certificate request goes unanswered.

The facility's insurance schedule typically scales with square footage and hall count, often pushing the required combined limit from a single-hall $1M/$2M baseline into a multi-hall excess layer, and the crowd management and fire-lane plan has to be redrawn for connecting concourses that did not exist in the smaller footprint.

No — an outside food vendor or caterer needs its own general liability and products liability coverage naming the organizer and facility as additional insureds, reviewed the same way any other exhibitor's certificate would be, plus confirmation of any health department permit the facility requires before hot equipment is allowed on the floor.