Show dictionary · Production Management
Drayage
Also: material handling
Drayage is the trade-show term for material handling: receiving your freight at the dock or warehouse, delivering it to your booth, storing the empty crates, and reversing it all at the close. It is billed by weight, traditionally per hundredweight (CWT), and it is the line item that shocks first-time exhibitors.
In practice
The word is a fossil from dray horses hauling carts, alive today because exhibit halls run on exclusive material-handling contracts: the general service contractor’s crews move everything on the show floor, and exhibitors pay published CWT rates with minimums, surcharges for late or uncrated freight, and special-handling fees that reward reading the exhibitor manual carefully.
Production crews touring corporate work meet drayage the moment a show lands in a convention center: cases that roll freely in a hotel ballroom become billable freight at the dock. Advance planning (consolidated shipments, advance-warehouse deadlines, certified weights) is the entire cost-control toolkit.
How you’ll hear it
"Everything ships to the advance warehouse; dock-direct drayage after the deadline doubles the rate."
Related resources
Part of the eventools.io Show Dictionary, a free glossary of live event production terminology.