What it really costs to ship one machine to a trade fair
Budget €10,000 to €25,000 per machine per fair for a large industrial machine within Europe, and €18,000 to €40,000 for anything over twelve tonnes or crossing an ocean. The freight invoice is usually less than half of it — crating, rigging, stand handling, insurance and the engineer days around the movement make up the rest, and those are the lines that get left out of the estimate.
The line items, and who forgets them
| Line | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Bespoke crate or cradle | €900–3,500 |
| Outbound freight (within Europe) | €2,500–7,000 |
| Return freight | €2,500–7,000 |
| Crane and rigging, both ends | €1,200–4,000 |
| On-site handling by the venue | €800–2,600 |
| Transit insurance | €400–1,800 |
| Engineer days for prep, install, strip | €1,500–4,000 |
| Refurbishment after transit damage | €0–3,000 |
The two most commonly omitted lines are venue handling and engineer days. Venue handling catches people because exhibition halls frequently mandate their own forklift crews at their own rates — you cannot bring your own. Engineer days get omitted because they are internal cost, so they never appear on an invoice, but the two or three people preparing, installing and stripping the machine were not doing their normal work for the best part of a week.
The cost that is not on the list
A machine on a stand is a machine not in a customer's yard. If it is a demonstrator, that is the intended use. If it came off the production line or out of stock, the real cost of the fair includes a machine unavailable to sell or hire for three to five weeks once transit both ways is counted.
For a manufacturer running four fairs a year, that can be most of a quarter for one asset.
How this compares to a virtual showroom
A first virtual showroom build for one machine sits in the low tens of thousands of euros — comparable to one or two physical movements of the same machine. The difference is what happens afterwards. The freight bill recurs every fair, forever. The build does not.
| Physical | Virtual | |
|---|---|---|
| First fair | €10k–25k | Build cost |
| Second fair | €10k–25k again | €0 |
| Machines shown | What fits on the stand | The whole range |
| Available between fairs | No | Yes, every day |
| Transit risk | Real | None |
This is not an argument for never shipping a machine. A serious buyer standing next to real steel closes deals, and nothing replaces that. It is an argument about which machines make the trip: the one that closes, rather than the four that were there to show the range.
The arithmetic that usually decides it
Take your machines shown per year, multiply by fairs per year, multiply by your own per-movement figure. A manufacturer showing four machines across three fairs at €14,000 a movement is spending €168,000 annually to let buyers stand next to steel. Redirect one fair's worth of that into a build, keep shipping the one machine that matters, and show the other three from a headset case.
Most manufacturers we speak to have never calculated this figure, because it lives across three budgets — marketing, logistics and production — and nobody owns the total.
The showroom page carries a calculator that takes your machines, your fairs and your own freight figure, and returns what a build would cost against what you are spending now.
Send us your files →