If you are exhibiting in New Orleans, you are almost certainly exhibiting here. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center handles the overwhelming majority of trade shows, conventions and exhibiting conferences that come to the city, and its scale is the reason: over a million square feet of contiguous exhibit space across twelve halls, making it one of the largest single-floor convention facilities in the United States.
That concentration is genuinely good news for an exhibitor. In cities where a dozen venues compete, you cannot know what your booth will need until you know which building you are in. Here, once you have a hall and a booth number, everything about the build becomes knowable in advance — because we install in this building constantly and the rules do not change from one show to the next.
Those two words are doing an enormous amount of work, and most exhibitors do not realize how much until they have exhibited somewhere else.
Everything is at grade. Freight comes in through ground-level docks directly onto the exhibit floor. There are no service elevators, no lifts, no crate-size limits imposed by the dimensions of an elevator car, and no long internal hauls between levels. If you have exhibited at a multi-level venue where oversized structural elements had to be engineered into sections that fit a lift, the difference here is immediate and it is worth real money.
Install runs faster. Material handling is more straightforward. Oversized and heavy components — machinery, vessels, subsea equipment, vehicles — move in without the sequencing gymnastics that a multi-level building demands. For the energy, maritime and manufacturing exhibitors who make up a large share of this city's show calendar, that is not a minor convenience. It is the reason large equipment shows come here.
The halls run in a line rather than a block. The Morial is long and linear, and attendees move through it that way. Your position along that line affects traffic more than it would in a square hall. Corner positions, cross-aisle locations and spaces near hall entrances and connectors see disproportionate footfall, and it is worth understanding where you sit relative to the entrances before you finalize a layout.
The exhibit halls run alphabetically along the length of the building and can be combined or divided depending on the size of the show. A large convention may occupy the majority of the building as one continuous floor; a smaller show may take a single hall with the rest closed off.
The practical consequences for you are two. First, if your show occupies multiple halls, find out which one you are in and where the connectors are — a booth near a hall connector sees traffic from both directions. Second, ceiling and rigging capability are broadly consistent across the exhibit halls, but available rigging points and permitted loads still vary by exact location on the floor. If your exhibit carries a hanging sign or a two-story structure, your specific coordinates need to be confirmed before the structure is engineered.
Beyond the exhibit halls, the building includes the Great Hall and a substantial amount of meeting and ballroom space used for association programming, general sessions and smaller exhibitions. Those spaces are finished environments rather than exhibit halls — the build standard is higher, floor protection is usually required, and rigging is limited.
Standard show regulations apply and they are enforced.
Inline booths are capped at eight feet on the back wall, with three-foot side rails across the front portion of the booth so your neighbours keep their sightlines to the aisle. That three-foot rule is the single constraint first-time exhibitors most often design around unsuccessfully — you cannot place a tall element at the aisle end of an inline booth, no matter how much you want to.
Island booths are permitted substantially higher, with the exact ceiling limit set by the show organizer. Fire clearance requirements, aisle-line compliance and rules governing covered ceilings within a booth all apply.
We prepare and submit the full drawing package for organizer and venue approval as part of every rental. You do not need to interpret the rules yourself, and you should not have to discover a problem at the approval stage that could have been designed around at the concept stage.
In a hall this long, identification at height is what makes you findable. At floor level you are competing with every other booth's furniture and structure; above the booth line you are competing with a handful of exhibitors.
Rigging involves three separate components, each with its own cost and its own deadline. The sign itself is fabricated — fabric, printed panels, or a structural truss element. Engineered drawings are produced and submitted for organizer approval, with a firm submission deadline. Rigging labor is then ordered through the show's official general contractor, billed by weight, with its own advance-order deadline.
Ordering rigging after the advance deadline costs materially more for identical work. We handle the drawings, the submission and the advance order as part of the rental.
This is where Morial projects succeed or fail operationally, and it has nothing to do with how good the booth looks.
Move-in runs on assigned target arrival windows. Freight that arrives outside its window waits — and while it waits, your install crew is standing on the floor with nothing to build. The knock-on effect is expensive: a missed target compresses the install into fewer hours, which pushes work into overtime rates, on a job where crew size was already committed.
We plan the target window into the project schedule from the day the job starts rather than the week of the show. Freight is routed to hit it and the paperwork is managed with the official contractor.
A New Orleans-specific note on scheduling: hurricane season runs June through November and it can affect freight routing and timing for shows in that window. It is not a reason to avoid exhibiting — the city runs a full calendar through those months — but it is a reason to build schedule margin into a fall project rather than planning to arrive exactly on time with no slack.
Drayage — material handling — is the charge for moving your freight from the dock to your booth space and back out at the end of the show. It is billed by the show's official general contractor by weight at published per-hundredweight rates, and it is unavoidable.
It is also the line item that surprises exhibitors most, because it is not charged by your exhibit house. We reduce it where it can legitimately be reduced — engineering crate weights down, consolidating shipments so you are not paying minimum charges repeatedly, and ordering against the advance rate rather than the show-site rate. What we will not do is leave it off the quote and let it appear on your final invoice.
Freeman, GES and Shepard all work this building depending on which show you are exhibiting at. Each has its own exhibitor kit, its own forms, its own deadlines and its own advance rates. We work with all three, read the kit for your specific show, and order against the advance-rate deadline.
The Morial floor is long, and scale reads differently here than in a compact hall.
A 10x10 works but demands discipline. In a hall this size an unlit 10x10 carrying dense copy is functionally invisible. It needs illumination, one message readable from thirty feet, and a counter with hidden storage so your cases are not the first thing a visitor sees.
A 10x20 gives you enough back wall to be legible from down a long aisle and enough floor for a demo that does not block your own entrance.
A 20x20 island is the first footprint that reads across the hall rather than down one aisle, and the first that permits a hanging sign. In a linear building with long sightlines, that height advantage is worth more here than it would be in a square hall.
20x40 and larger support private meeting rooms, presentation areas with seating and separate staff circulation. At this scale a hanging structure is effectively mandatory.
Double-decks are permitted here with organizer approval, and the ground-level freight access makes them considerably more practical to build than at a multi-level venue. They still require engineered stamped drawings, occupancy calculations, code-compliant stairs and railings and fire clearance review. We confirm eligibility for your specific show before you commit and handle the entire approval package.
Our own crews install and dismantle at the Morial. Install is scheduled against the show's move-in window and coordinated directly with the official general contractor. We work within union jurisdiction where it applies and manage that relationship as part of the job.
On the floor we handle structure, graphics, flooring, lighting, furniture placement and final dress, and we do not leave until the booth is show-ready and you have walked it with us. We stay reachable through show days for damaged panels, failed lighting or anything that needs moving.
Dismantle begins when the show closes. We strike, pack properly and manage outbound freight, so your team leaves when the show ends rather than staying to supervise a teardown.
Every rental is quoted turnkey: the complete engineered structure pre-fit in our shop before shipping, all printed graphics produced in house, flooring, lighting, furniture appropriate to the design, delivery to the venue, coordination with the general contractor, professional install and dismantle by our own crews, on-call support through show days, and full removal.
Show-charged services — electrical, rigging labor, material handling, cleaning and internet — are itemized separately as estimates against published advance rates and reconciled at actual cost.
Call (504) 208-2737 with your show name, hall and booth number. We will confirm what that specific location permits, what your rigging options are, what a realistic install timeline looks like against your target move-in, and what the booth costs delivered and installed.
Call (504) 208-2737 for New Orleans exhibit rentals.