Media technology · Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV · Apr 3-7, 2027

NAB Show 2027lead capture

The honest read on NAB Show 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.

NAB Show 2027 fact sheet

Organizer scanner rental

$508 to $600

per device or package, 2026 SWAP order form

Booth hotspot, up to 10 users

$1,750 advance

5 Mbps, on the Cox Business hotspot form issued for NAB 2026

Show days · order clock

Apr 3-7, 2027

Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV. Last edition's rates stepped up by order date.

Tendro (our line in this table)

$499 flat

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

The basics

NAB Show 2027 at a glance

Broadcast, streaming, production and post, audio, cloud and AI media-tech vendors fill this floor, and NAB counted 40,000+ attendees from 144 countries at the 2026 show.

Show dates	April 3-7, 2027 (exhibits Apr 4-7)
Venue	Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV
Lead retrieval	Registration through Maritz (Experient). Lead retrieval by Maritz SWAP.
Who exhibits	Media technology

The scanner cost

What does lead retrieval cost at NAB Show 2027?

The 2026 SWAP order form ran $508 to $600 per device or package. The next edition's form typically drops with the exhibitor service kit.

Those are the 2026 numbers, so read them as the shape, not today's quote. The next edition's form typically arrives with the exhibitor service kit and the tiers tend to move a little.

Device (2026 form)	Advance	Standard	Onsite
SWAP mobile app on your own devices	$540	$540	$540
Handheld badge scanner rental	$508	$589	$600

The price steps up as the show nears: advance, then standard, then onsite. The 2026 calendar cutoffs do not carry over, so treat the current service kit as the only source for real deadline dates. Note the per-device line: every extra scanner is another rental.

NAB Show Exhibit Services published the 2026 Maritz SWAP rates on its commonly-ordered-items sheet. The 2027 rates are not public yet; exhibitors order Maritz lead retrieval from the NAB Show Exhibitor Dashboard. Source.

The badge

What does the NAB Show 2027 badge actually encode?

NAB has not published what its badge encodes. Assume an ID that only the Maritz SWAP scanner resolves.

NAB tells exhibitors to buy Maritz lead retrieval to scan attendee badges, and it priced real-time data as a separate $736 Developer's Kit in 2026, but no public NAB source states the badge's code type or what it encodes. The conservative assumption is an organizer ID resolved only by the Maritz scanner. Tendro reads the printed face by OCR and enriches the contact; it does not resolve the organizer's ID. A vCard or MeCard QR, if a badge carries one, decodes directly.

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 Las Vegas Convention Center?

LVCC booth internet is sold by the venue's exclusive provider: at NAB 2026 a 10-user 5 Mbps hotspot was $1,750 advance or $2,100 standard, a 3 Mbps wired drop $500.

Cox Business's NAB 2026 hotspot form names Cox the exclusive provider of voice, data and video at the Las Vegas Convention Center. NAB's 2026 sheet priced a shared 3 Mbps wired drop at $500 advance or $600 standard, 10 Mbps at $750 or $900, and a dedicated 5 Mbps line at $1,893 or $2,933. The booth hotspot is sold by user count: up to 10 users at 5 Mbps was $1,750 advance or $2,100 standard, 25 users $2,500 or $3,000, and the 10 Mbps versions started at $2,000. The advance rate applies only to orders placed and paid 30 days before the show, and orders inside 72 hours carry a 20% expedite fee. Every phone on the booth that needs the hotspot counts against that user cap.

Those are NAB 2026 rates. The LVCC forms already issued for CES in January 2027 are branded Spectrum Business at the same hotspot prices, so check the 2027 kit before budgeting.

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.

NAB's 2027 lead-retrieval rates are not public yet, so the guide is the 2026 sheet NAB Show Exhibit Services published for Maritz SWAP, and it has one quirk worth reading twice. The SWAP mobile app was a flat $540 across all three columns: no early-bird discount, no late penalty. Only the handheld stepped, $508 early, $589 advance and $600 late, so the rented scanner undercut the $540 app only at the early rate; from the advance column on, the app was cheaper. Five rented handhelds on the early rate came to $2,540. Getting scans into your own system in real time was a separate $736 Developer's Kit line. Every device rate rose over NAB 2025: the app from $525, the early handheld from $494. The same booth on Tendro is $499 flat, however many phones. Booth internet runs on its own clock: the LVCC hotspot for ten users was $1,750 when ordered and paid 30 days out and $2,100 after, and the LVCC forms already issued for January 2027 carry Spectrum Business branding in place of Cox.

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 NAB Show 2027?

Run the free desk test before NAB Show 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 NAB Show 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