Stands held, contracted, confirmed — with a rebooking queue. Crosstable governs the allocation layer a slick public floor plan leaves on a spreadsheet: option-hold discipline, defensible priority ranking, and the audit trail behind every placement.
A show organiser owns the inventory — a hall divided into individually-numbered booths, each with a size, a type, a price zone and a status. A sales team works the interactive plan as its product catalogue, releasing priority exhibitors first and opening general sales later. Operations owns the master plan as a compliance document, signed off with the fire marshal.
The sell-side map is served by dedicated floor-plan software, but small and mid-size organisers frequently still run the allocation itself on Excel and a static CAD plan. What still runs on the sheet is the governance — priority-points ranking, the defensible rebooking queue, option-hold expiry, competitor-conflict checking — and shows lose a quarter to a third of their exhibitors each year, so a structured rebooking is worth real money.
An option hold has no expiry discipline, so a "pencilled-in" stand sits unsold while a paying exhibitor is turned away.
The rebooking queue has no defensible order, so a priority-points dispute during the space draw comes down to whose email is quoted.
A competitor conflict caught late forces a cascade of reassignments across the whole plan.
Booth status (sold versus reserved) drifts from whether the deposit actually landed, because the CAD plan and the finance sheet are different documents.
Each booth carries one active booking per edition, and a second is refused. Because a show sells per edition there are no overlapping dates to argue over — the real competition is the year-over-year rebooking cycle, which runs on the dated waiting list and its priority order, not on a calendar. Holds carry an expiry date so options genuinely lapse, and the whole journey runs on separated duties: sales holds, finance confirms the deposit, the director approves against priority rules, and operations checks the placement against the venue.
Booths positioned on the hall plan by aisle and row, coloured by live status, with type — inline, corner, peninsula, end-cap, island — carried on each.
The tentative hold is a time-boxed stage, so "held as let for 21 days" is enforced automatically instead of forgotten.
The year-over-year space draw runs on the dated queue with reason-mandatory out-of-order allocation — exactly the artefact a rebooking dispute needs.
Enquiry through contract, deposit, confirmation and occupancy, each step resting on the real legal instrument — the Application and Contract for Exhibit Space.
The space contract and invoice are generated from the booking; sold status is gated on deposit receipt.
The core enforces one exhibitor per booth, runs the option-hold expiry and the rebooking queue. The rest is the setup conversation.
Competitor-adjacency conflict checks — a soft, overridable map warning, never a hard blocker, because every major show reserves override discretion.
Weighted priority-points scoring and ranked selection-window appointments.
Booth combination and splitting, with type reclassification and the corner / island / upper-deck surcharge table.
Category exclusivity sold as sponsorship — a hard lock on sales, tied to your product categories.
Co-exhibitor child records and fees, shell-versus-space height and structural-approval workflow, and the installment payment schedule.