HVACR · McCormick Place, Chicago, IL · Jan 25-27, 2027

AHR Expo 2027lead capture

The honest read on AHR Expo 2027: what the organizer scanner really costs, what the badge encodes, and whether the venue WiFi holds up. Tendro is a lead capture app: your booth team scans badges and business cards with their phones, and it is $499 flat for the whole team at one event. One $499 fee covers every phone on your booth staff, instead of renting scanners per device.

Start free trial See the cost breakdown

Test the free desk trial: point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards and judge the enrichment yourself. No credit card.

AHR Expo 2027 fact sheet

Organizer scanner rental

$475 to $575

per device or package, the published 2027 SWAP order form

Free WiFi, not in booths

768 Kbps

McCormick Place: meeting rooms, public space and hall hotspots only

Show days · order clock

Jan 25-27, 2027

McCormick Place, Chicago, IL. The advance rate ends on December 15, 2026; every order after that pays the second column.

Tendro (our line in this table)

$499 flat

whole booth team, one event, any badge from their phones

The basics

AHR Expo 2027 at a glance

More than 1,900 HVACR manufacturers and suppliers exhibit here, selling heating, cooling, refrigeration, ventilation, plumbing and building automation to engineers, contractors, facility managers and OEMs.

Show dates	January 25-27, 2027
Venue	McCormick Place, Chicago, IL
Lead retrieval	Registration by Maritz. Lead retrieval by Maritz SWAP, the show's exclusive badge-scanner provider.
Who exhibits	HVACR

The scanner cost

What does lead retrieval cost at AHR Expo 2027?

The published 2027 SWAP order form runs $475 to $575 per device or package, with one dated rate cutoff before the show.

These are current numbers, not a prior-year proxy. Maritz SWAP publishes the 2027 form in the open, and the form prints its own cutoffs. The advance rate ends on December 15, 2026; every order after that pays the second column. The last tier carries no end date. It runs to the show.

Device (2027 form)	Through 12/15/26	After 12/15/26
App package on your own devices (three activations)	$525	$575
Handheld rental (one activation)	$475	$525
Tablet rental (one activation)	$475	$525

The add-ons ride on top of the device line. Every activation past the three in the app package is $149. A Bluetooth printer is $149 and pairs with one device only. Custom sales qualifiers or surveys are $109 through December 15 and $139 after. Delivery to the booth is $199. Feeding scans into your own lead system is the Event API line, $850. Processing is $9.99, waived when you order through the online portal. Purchase orders are not accepted, and cancellation outside 30 days is $100, inside it no refund.

The same form prices the failure case. Leads captured as badge images or handwritten badge IDs are available for upload within 14 days after the show and carry a data services fee. That is the organizer's own fallback for a badge its scanner could not read.

The 2027 Maritz SWAP order form is public, linked from the Badge Scanner section of the AHR Expo exhibitor manual. Orders go through exhibitor.swap.mge360.com, and the advance rate ends on December 15, 2026. Source.

The badge

What does the AHR Expo 2027 badge actually encode?

AHR's manual says the visitor badge QR holds contact and demographic data for a lead system. It does not publish the QR's format.

The AHR Expo exhibitor manual says visitor badges include a QR code containing the visitor's contact details and demographic information, readable by an exhibitor's lead retrieval system, and that an exhibitor badge carries the same QR only when visitor credentials are added at registration. The manual does not say how that QR is encoded, and Maritz SWAP is the show's exclusive lead-retrieval provider. Tendro reads the printed face by OCR and enriches the contact; it does not resolve an organizer ID. A vCard or MeCard QR decodes directly, but nothing public says this badge carries one.

No universal app, Tendro included, decodes the organizer's encoded badge ID; what Tendro reads is the printed face, the name, title, and company, and enrichment fills the verified email and firmographics the badge leaves off. Same for business cards and QR codes.

So the honest limit carries its own fix: without the organizer's licensed access (the rented scanner or a paid event API) no app resolves the encoded ID, and OCR plus enrichment returns the named, verified contact without waiting on the rental. The universal badge scanner explainer walks through how.

One more thing worth checking: exhibitor contracts vary on third-party capture policies, so read yours before the show.

The WiFi

Does the WiFi hold up at McCormick Place?

McCormick Place's own exhibitor WiFi guidance limits complimentary 768 Kbps WiFi to meeting rooms, public spaces and a few hall hotspots; booths need a paid line.

McCormick Place offers complimentary WiFi at 768 Kbps in meeting rooms and public spaces, plus the permanent food-pod areas and one hotspot per exhibit hall, and says access can be sporadic. It is not booth coverage, and an organizer WiFi buyout can change the terms, so booths that need a connection order paid service. Its wireless internet page has the details.

The AHR Expo manual adds its own warning: free WiFi covers public spaces, is shared bandwidth, and is recommended only for low-data work like email. McCormick Place Technology Services is the exclusive booth internet provider, with January 5 as the best-rate order date.

It gets worse under load. Show-floor WiFi is half-duplex, and per Cisco's high-density WiFi design guidance, a single access point degrades past roughly 25 clients per radio. The busiest hour on the floor is the hour the signal is thinnest.

Tendro captures to the phone first. Every scan queues locally with its real timestamp and syncs in order when the connection returns, so a soft WiFi bar never costs you a lead. The offline capture write-up covers how the queue behaves when the venue drops.

The alternative

What is the $499-per-event alternative?

Tendro is $499 per event with unlimited team members, never per device. A five-person booth pays one flat fee, not five rentals.

AHR Expo's 2027 form is public: the SWAP App Package, three activations on your own phones, is $525 through December 15, 2026 and $575 after, and a rented handheld or tablet is $475 then $525. The app is still priced per head. Every activation past three is $149, so a five-rep booth on its own phones is $823 before the cutoff and $873 after, and the $850 Event API line that feeds scans into your own lead system is extra. The same booth on Tendro is $499 flat. The badge is the other AHR detail: the exhibitor manual says the visitor badge QR contains the visitor's contact details and demographic information, while an exhibitor badge only carries that QR if visitor credentials were added at registration. The manual does not publish the QR's format.

One fee, not per device.$499 covers the whole booth. Unlimited devices, unlimited scans. A five-person team is one rental, not five.

Season pass for a full calendar.Running the year? The season pass prices shows in volume, a flat per-event rate that drops as you add events.

Any CRM with a public API.Salesforce, HubSpot, or any CRM with a public API. Sync starts with your first paid event, under 10 seconds scan to record.

Start free trial The hidden cost of organizer scanners

The desk trial

How do you test it before AHR Expo 2027?

Run the free desk test before AHR Expo 2027: scan old badges and business cards, judge the enrichment, then decide.

The free trial is the scan-and-enrichment desk test. Point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards, watch what Tendro reads and enriches, and grade the data before AHR Expo 2027 opens.

We do not publish a blanket enrichment match rate. Industrial badges enrich differently than SaaS ones, which is exactly why the desk test exists: run it on your own badge stack.

The free trial covers capture and enrichment; CRM sync switches on with your first paid event, so you test field mapping against a real show, not a sandbox. The desk test costs a lunch break and answers the enrichment question before any show is on the line.

Straight answers