Exhibitor Churn Is the Leaky Bucket of the Trade Show Industry — Here’s How to Fix It

The average successful trade show will churn between 25–35% of its exhibitors year over year. Many events, however, are far closer to 50% exhibitor churn. For even a small exhibition, that can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. For larger events, it can mean millions.

Exhibitor churn is the leaky bucket of our industry.

Yet despite the financial impact, churn prevention rarely receives the same attention as exhibitor acquisition or on-site rebooking.

Why Isn’t Exhibitor Churn a Bigger Priority?

I ask this question often because exhibitor retention should be a top priority for every event organizer. I began my career as an organizer and have now spent nearly a decade working in event technology. Across that time, I’ve consistently seen far more energy invested in advertising, prospecting, and upselling than in preventing exhibitors from quietly slipping away.

The industry has a healthy obsession with on-site rebook—but it’s usually framed around how many companies can be signed and how much revenue can be captured in a short window. Senior leaders focus on urgency, floor-plan scarcity, and upsell opportunities. What’s often missing is a deliberate strategy to identify and support exhibitors who are already on the brink of leaving.

In SaaS, churn and customer lifetime value are boardroom-level metrics. Losing a customer is treated as a serious event because retention directly impacts valuation and long-term growth.

Trade shows rarely think this way.

At MYS, through our booking and rebooking technology, we handle stand sales and rebooking for 250,000+ exhibitors annually across 600+ events. We have arguably more data than any single entity in the market on bookings, rebooking's and perhaps, most interestingly, exhibitor churn.

Depending on show size and cost per square meter, a “normal” 25–35% churn rate can easily translate into $300K–$1M in lost revenue per event—often more.

It may be trade show teams are so adept at finding new companies to exhibit and upselling existing companies exhibitor churn continues  without patching the leaky bucket or it even seems to end up fuller than the previous year.

Churn Is Natural — But It’s Also Predictable

To be clear, exhibitor churn isn’t inherently bad. Some churn is healthy. It introduces new brands, new ideas, and new energy for attendees. Many churn drivers are outside an organizer’s control.

But here’s the key reframe:

Most exhibitors want your event to work.

“Everyone who exhibits at your event desperately wants it to be successful. Most exhibitors know before they arrive whether this might be their last year.”

Richard Kensett

VP or Regional Sales, Map Your Show

That insight changes everything.

If exhibitors often know they’re at risk of churning ahead of time, then churn is not just a lagging metric—it’s a predictive opportunity.

What’s Holding Organizers Back?

The biggest barrier isn’t intent—it’s data.

Organizers are excellent at broad, experience-level improvements. But hyper-individualized retention strategies feel hard to scale without reliable, actionable insight.

Yet imagine having a list of 30–50 exhibitors flagged as “at risk” six weeks before your event.

That shift—from guessing to knowing—fundamentally changes how rebooking strategies are built.

Using AI and Predictive Analytics to Identify At-Risk Exhibitors

With modern event technology, organizers already have the raw data needed to identify churn risk. Engagement, booking behavior, payment timing, lead performance—these signals exist across most event ecosystems.

Last year at MYS, we built a predictive model for our clients to see how accurate we could get with predictive analytics called ‘MYS Insights’. Using data from our stand and sponsorship booking technology, our exhibitor portal, exhibitor lead management tools, and mobile app and the results blew my mind.

Our data scientists looked at millions of exhibitors with year-to-year historical data and through tweaking and testing the weighting of more than 25 factors, we managed to reach 70% accuracy at predicting churn before rebooking onsite began.

Key indicators included:

• Changes in stand size year over year
• Early vs. late booking behavior
• Length of exhibitor tenure
• Payment patterns
• Engagement with exhibitor portals and emails
• Lead performance compared to benchmarks

“If I can give a sales team a list where seven out of ten exhibitors are statistically likely to churn—six weeks before the event—that’s like handing them a crystal ball.”

Richard Kensett

VP of Sales, Map Your Show

You Don’t Need AI to Start Acting on Churn

While predictive analytics accelerates and scales retention efforts, the webinar made one thing clear: you can start today—even without advanced tools.

Sales teams already have valuable signals:

• First-time exhibitors
• Reduced spend year over year
• Poor engagement or responsiveness
• Negative feedback from previous editions
• Gut-feel concerns from account managers

Creating even a basic exhibitors-at-risk list enables proactive conversations, expectation-setting, and tailored solutions that can extend exhibitor lifetime value by one or two years—or more.

The Strategic Payoff of Reducing Exhibitor Churn

Retention isn’t about saving everyone.

It’s about:

• Buying time to improve your proposition
• Aligning exhibitor goals earlier in the lifecycle
• Protecting high-value revenue already in your ecosystem
• Creating momentum before, during, and after the event

As Debbie summarized toward the end of the webinar:

Trade show growth doesn’t come only from finding new exhibitors. It comes from understanding why existing ones leave and intervening earlier.

Whether through AI-powered insights or better internal alignment, exhibitor churn is no longer a mystery problem. It’s a solvable one.

On December 18th, Debbie Lee, Co-Founder of Benchmark, who this year supported rebooking strategy and execution for more than 250 exhibitions, joined me for a webinar where we discussed the importance of uncovering the causes of exhibitor churn and showing our strategy solutions to mitigate exhibitor loss.

Watch The Webinar Replay Here:

The Missing Piece to Your Rebook Strategy in 2026