What Is Drayage, and Does It Apply to a Video Crew at a Las Vegas Trade Show?

Drayage — also called material handling — is the trade show industry's term for moving freight between the loading dock or marshaling yard and a booth, billed by weight through the show's general service contractor. A video crew that hand-carries cameras, lenses, and gear bags in rolling cases typically never triggers a drayage charge at all; the fee is aimed at booth crates and heavy equipment shipped ahead through the advance warehouse, not gear a crew walks in with, per GES's exhibitor guide to trade show material handling.

What Drayage Actually Is

Every major trade show hires a general service contractor — Freeman is the most common name at Las Vegas Convention Center shows — to run the show floor: electrical drops, rigging, aisle carpet, and freight handling. Drayage is that last piece. Cases and crates arrive either at the advance warehouse days before the show opens or directly at the venue's marshaling yard during move-in, and the contractor's crews are the only ones allowed to move that freight from the dock to a booth. The charge is calculated by weight and covers both delivery to the booth and pickup after the show closes. For the broader list of what changes show to show, see our guide to filming at Las Vegas conventions and trade shows.

Freight Terms Worth Knowing Before the Manual Arrives

Exhibitor manuals use a few terms interchangeably that are worth knowing before reading one for the first time. Advance warehouse shipping means freight arrives at a designated warehouse days or weeks before the show and the general service contractor delivers it to the booth on a set schedule; direct-to-show-site shipping means freight arrives during the show's own move-in window instead, usually at a higher per-hundredweight rate but without the advance warehouse's storage window. A bill of lading is the shipping document that identifies what is in each case and who it belongs to — freight without one can get held up at the dock while material handling staff sort out ownership. None of this applies to a rolling case a crew member wheels in through the front doors, which is exactly why hand-carrying gear is the simpler path for a lean production.

Why a Video Crew Usually Skips the Charge

Drayage exists to control who touches freight on a union show floor, not to tax every piece of equipment that enters the building. A crew that arrives with camera bodies, lenses, tripods, and a handful of rolling cases — carrying that gear in through the same doors as attendees, rather than shipping it to the advance warehouse or checking it as freight — is not handing anything to the material handling contractor to move. No freight bill of lading, no dock assignment, no drayage invoice follows. This is the normal pattern for a documentary-style ENG/EFP crew covering a booth, a keynote, or b-roll around the show floor.

When Drayage Does Apply to a Production

The moment a production starts shipping cases ahead of the show — lighting packages, a grip truck's worth of gear, a multi-camera package with cases too large or numerous to hand-carry — that freight moves through the same advance-warehouse and marshaling-yard process as any other exhibit shipment, and drayage charges follow. This is more common on larger multi-camera event coverage or a livestream build with a full LED or staging package than on a two-person interview crew. If a production is shipping freight rather than flying it in as luggage, it is worth asking the exhibitor's general service contractor for the advance-warehouse shipping deadline before cases go out the door — missing that date can mean a scramble at move-in and a higher direct-to-show-site rate.

Planning Load-In Around It

Even when a crew avoids drayage entirely, the loading dock and marshaling yard still shape the shoot schedule. Vehicles typically check in at a marshaling yard and get called forward to a dock in sequence rather than driving straight to the building, and dock access windows are tighter during the hours right before a show opens. A crew that plans its arrival around the exhibitor manual's move-in schedule — instead of assuming street parking or a walk-in credential will cover it — avoids losing the first hour of a call time to a line of production trucks. Coordinating this with whoever is managing the booth build is usually enough; the general service contractor's exhibitor services desk can also confirm dock hours for a specific show.

Mr. Camera

We cover trade shows across the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Strip's convention centers regularly, and we plan every load-in around the specific show's freight and dock rules before the crew shows up. If you are staffing a booth or keynote shoot and want to know what your gear package will trigger, our trade show video production team can review your gear list against the show's exhibitor manual.

Related: corporate video production in Las Vegas, our corporate interview and headshot studio, and testimonial and customer story video.