This calculator totals what one physical trade fair stand costs you and puts a digital participation next to it, using your numbers rather than ours. You enter stand area, market, open days, headcount and the per-unit costs; it returns a physical total, a digital total, the gap in money and in percent, the cost per attending person, and the cost per meeting. The arithmetic runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent to onMESSE or to any third party — and the whole scenario is encoded in the page address, so the link you copy reproduces exactly what you see. The pre-filled figures are deliberately wide planning ranges, not quotes.
Updated: 2026-08-29 · Reading time: 21 min · Tool
Most exhibitors know what the stand space costs. Far fewer know what the fair costs, because space rental is one line among a dozen and the other eleven arrive as separate invoices, from separate suppliers, over several months, approved by people who never see each other's numbers. This page adds them up in one place, puts a digital participation beside the total, and shows the difference per person and per meeting.
The calculator sits at the top of this page and has two halves. On the left you describe the physical stand: the market you are exhibiting in, stand area in square metres, how many days the fair is open, how many build-up and tear-down days your team is on site, how many people travel, and then the per-unit costs — space rental per square metre, stand construction per square metre, compulsory services per square metre, freight and handling as one sum, return flight per person, hotel per person per night, meals and local transport per person per day, loaded staff cost per person per day, and pre-fair marketing. Below that you describe the digital side: the participation fee you were quoted, content and profile production, optional paid promotion, and the hours per person per day you will actually staff the live period. On the right, a panel recalculates on every keystroke and shows the physical total, the digital total, the gap in money and in percent, the cost per attending person on each side, and — if you set a meeting target — the cost per meeting. Under the panel, a line-by-line breakdown shows which rows carry the total, because the answer to "where did the money go" is almost never the row people expect.
The reason fair budgets overrun is structural, not careless. Ten distinct suppliers bill you, on ten different dates, and several of them bill for things the sales conversation never mentioned because they live in the exhibitor manual rather than the offer. Here is the full list, with the reason each one gets forgotten.
The last three rows are why a fair that looked affordable in January is over budget by June. They are approved by different people, on different dates, from different budget lines, and they only reconcile when somebody finally adds them together. Adding them together is what this page is for.
Below are the ranges the presets are built from, for a large business-to-business fair in Central Europe, expressed in euro. They are ranges, and they are stated as ranges because narrowing them without your organiser's tariff sheet would be guesswork dressed as precision. The right-hand column names the document that contains the real figure.
The United States preset is a different shape rather than a bigger version of the same one. American organisers usually quote per square foot — one square metre is 10.76 square feet — and material handling, known in the industry as drayage, is billed by weight by the show's official contractor and can rival the freight bill itself. Where labour rules require the official contractor to install the stand, that cost belongs in the construction field, not the services field.
Choosing Türkiye as the market clears every money field instead of filling it. That is a decision, not an omission. Under persistent inflation a default captured a year ago is not an approximation of today's price; it is a wrong number wearing the costume of a right one, and it is more dangerous than an empty box because it does not ask to be checked. Domestic square-metre rates also vary far more between organisers and halls than the European band does. The tool therefore asks for the figure on the organiser's current price list and shows an explicit notice until you supply it.
A digital participation is not free, and a comparison that treats it as free is worth nothing. Four lines carry it, and the third one is the one exhibitors underestimate.
Notice what is absent: no freight, no build, no flights, no hotel, no tear-down, and no expiry date on the profile. For a definition of what a digital fair is and is not, see what is a digital trade fair.
The currency selector is a shortcut to a market. Picking EUR, USD or TRY loads that currency's market preset — the unit label, the planning bands and the pre-filled figures all move together, so the number under the sign always belongs to that sign. It does not convert, and it cannot leave a euro figure standing under a lira label. A calculator that runs entirely in the browser cannot fetch an exchange rate, and quietly applying a hard-coded one would be worse than doing nothing: yesterday's rate would silently rewrite a number you were about to put in front of a finance director.
A total on its own does not decide anything. Two derived figures do most of the work.
Cost per meeting is where the comparison stops being about money and starts being about the fair. A physical stand with a strong location and a prepared team can reach a lower cost per meeting than a digital participation with a thin profile — the arithmetic does not care which channel you prefer. To take the next step and put revenue against the cost, work through how to measure trade fair ROI.
This calculator will usually show a large gap in favour of digital participation, because travel and construction are large and they do not exist online. That does not make the physical fair the wrong choice. It makes it an expensive choice that has to earn its price, and there are cases where it plainly does.
The useful question is rarely "which one". It is "how many physical fairs does this budget really justify, and what carries the rest of the year". If you are weighing that trade-off for a specific team, for exhibitors sets out how participation works in practice, and for agencies covers the intermediary case.
Nothing here is hidden. Every operation the calculator performs is listed below, so you can reproduce it in a spreadsheet and disagree with it precisely.
on_site_days = open_days + build_days
nights = on_site_days
space = area × space_per_sqm
build = area × build_per_sqm
services = area × services_per_sqm
travel = people × (flight + nights × hotel + on_site_days × per_diem)
staff_physical = people × on_site_days × loaded_day_cost
physical_total = space + build + services + freight + travel + staff_physical + marketing
hourly = loaded_day_cost ÷ 8
staff_digital = digital_people × open_days × hours_per_day × hourly
digital_people
digital_total = participation_fee + content + digital_promotion + staff_digital
difference = physical_total − digital_total
difference_pct = difference ÷ physical_total
per_person = total ÷ people
per_meeting = total ÷ meetings_expected
That has one consequence worth stating plainly: because the scenario is in the URL, a link you paste into a group chat contains your stand budget and your payroll rate. That is the correct trade — it is what makes the result shareable at all — but it is your link to place, so place it deliberately.
A gap in the total is the beginning of the argument, not the end of it. Take the physical total and divide it by the number of qualified meetings you logged at the last edition; if you cannot, that missing number is the more urgent problem and trade fair ROI is where to start. Then look at which fairs are actually running on the fairs page, check what a package includes on pricing, and if you sell into health tourism, look at Health onMESSE, where the packages and the audience are set per edition rather than per platform.
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