Event badge printing, it’s a headache, isn’t it? Every time you move venues or change countries you may need to find yet another badge printing partner who can provide onsite registration services for you.
It’s time consuming having to Google for “onsite badge printing in Croatia” and then reaching out to various companies to learn about their services, whether they can support you, and if their proposals are within budget. Sometimes even trying to find one that can help you feel exhausting.
Then, even when you have found that one company you think you can work with, it’s a worry for you because you’re handing over your event’s first impression to your attendees to a company you haven’t worked with before. Will they do a good job? You’ll find out when your doors open.
We hear this time and time again from customers who come to us seeking support with their badge printing needs. It’s clear to see they have been let down in the past and are eager to find that one partner that can follow them across the world and deliver a reliable onsite badge printing service for their events.
In simple terms the main reasons it’s hard to find badge printing companies that can help you is down to location and people resources. Unless that company has a full-time presence in and around your chosen venue location, it’s difficult for them to support you, and when they can, the cost of that service invariably falls outside of your budget.
Other limitations can include their ability to produce the badge styles and types for you to retain your event brand theme, lack of integration with your ticketing system that prevent you from offering online ticket sales leading up to and during your event, and their availability to offer you their services on the date of your event.
These issues can cause you to look for alternatives.
We find that when an organizer cannot find an onsite badge printing company, they’ll start looking at printing their attendee passes in bulk in advance and then having them shipped to the venue in time for the event.
At face value the cost is cheap, just a few hundred dollars plus shipping for 1,000 badges seems reasonable right?
True, but the cost of producing the badge is just a fraction of the overall cost you’re going to incur.
When pre-printing badges (you can get them from us too) there is a cut-off date for production.
Many companies that offer these pre-printed badges will state they need a minimum of 14-days between you supplying the data to them producing it and shipping it to your venue.
The problem with this is that for many conferences and exhibitions, the last 2-weeks before your event is your busiest sign-up period. You’re going to have several tens or hundreds that arrive and they won’t have a printed badge.
How are you going to deal with those? What impression of your event are they going to get from having a handwritten badge?
What if the badges get lost or don’t arrive on time because of shipping delays?
However, even if you do accept these downsides in favor of budget, you’ve got to somehow check-in and hand everyone their badge.
This takes co-ordination, organization, and a lot of people to ensure your attendees can get into your event quickly.
Even if you have the people power and the badges are sorted alphabetically, attendees never arrive in order and without an effective and experienced team your check-in can quickly descend into chaos.
We find many organizers who choose this option end up wishing they hadn’t.
We’re seeing a lot of event organizers looking into badge printing kiosk rental options. There are two main hardware rental providers in the event industry, Choose2Rent and One World Rental.
We have worked with both and are familiar with their products and services.
Hardware rental seems a viable middle ground between pre-printing and finding a dedicated onsite badge printing specialist. You at least get the hardware onsite to run your own onsite check-in.
However, we find that organizers are not prepared for the cost and operation of this solution.
When it comes to cost, be prepared to hire by the day and with a minimum rental period of usually 3-days. Also, should your event begin on a Monday or end on a Friday, you may be charged additional rental fees to cover the weekend before or after your event as courier collections / deliveries are weekdays only.
The cost doesn’t end with the hardware rental, you’ll have the cost of shipping the kit to your venue as well as the cost of the return. On top of that, the cost of consumables like ink and of course the badge paper / card itself.
There are also late return penalties should your venue not offer the equipment to the courier on collection.
All of these costs are quite reasonable in terms of why they are charged, but often organizers don’t fully appreciate how much it all costs.
Then on top of all the cost you must find a software solution to scan your event ticket and print out your badge (and maybe a designer to help design your badge style). This will be extra cost on top of the hardware rental.
Then you need to consider training, support, and onsite staffing.
Are you prepared for any technical glitches on event day and how well are you going to be supported to resolve them when the technician is on the phone and maybe in a different country?
Once you’ve factored in all this you may find the cost can be similar to hiring a dedicated badge printing company to deliver the solution for you.
We provide onsite badge printing for events in North America, Europe, United Kingdom, and the Middle East primarily, but can support other countries by request.
Unlike rental providers, we also provide you with the full wrap around services you’re looking for when needing a badge printing solution.
This includes the check-in software, integration to your ticket selling platform, pre-event and during event support with badge designing, test printing, and onsite delivery, setup, and management. We can even supply you with lanyards.
We offer 3 main badge printing services for you to choose from. Each of them carefully created to meet your needs and budget.
Rental Only
Unlike our competitors in the rental only space, you get everything you need to run your own event check-in and onsite badge printing delivered to you.
This includes our software pre-installed, machines configured specifically to your event specification, ink, badges, and most importantly of all remote connectivity software so we’re able to remotely connect to the kiosks in any location to make those technical changes you may need.
We don’t charge you rental by the day or when weekends get in the way of delivery and collections. Our price is based on a flat rate hire. So if your event is one day or five, the rental price is the same.
In addition, you use our online platform that can integrate with your own registration system like Cvent, Whova, Ticket Tailor etc. so it receives registrations in real time. This means you can still be selling tickets at your event and badges can still be printed without delay.
We’ve designed our own transport cases so that everything you need, e.g. printer, laptop or tablet, scanner, all cables, ink, and badges fit into one case that can be shipped directly to your venue, reducing the overall cost of shipping and reducing the risk of part of the equipment being delayed through the logistics chain.
When you receive the kiosk, the case will include a detailed instruction manual with pictures showing you exactly what you need to do. Its very simple, all you need to do is plug in the power and USB cable.
But that’s not all, we are online ready to assist you through the setup process by telephone and through remote desktop software which means we can control the kiosks from our office. We’ll also remain on hand at a moment’s notice to support you should anything happen during your registration period.
When your event is over, simply put all the kit back into the case, attach the return shipping label, and walk away. We arrange with the venue to have the cases collected the next working day.
Assisted Onsite Badge Printing
Our assisted badge printing solution is our most popular solution organizers like you choose.
With this solution we send a trained technician to your venue alongside the equipment. They will set it all up, test its working properly, train your staff on how to use it, and remain onsite throughout your event to provide immediate support when you need it.
The daily operation of your check-in process will be run by your own staff. These could be volunteers that are already at your event saving you thousands of dollars in staffing costs.
Don’t worry though, you’re not paying the technician to just sit there. They will actively participate in the operation of your check-in process giving you an extra pair of hands when you need it.
A big benefit of having an onsite presence is that should any of your attendees need assistance such as changing their job title, company name, or even their own name, our technician can do that for you, taking the stress out of your registration process.
As we are at your event, it means we can get creative with the way we provide the hardware.
Our printers, the Epson C3500 are capable of printing a badge every 5 seconds. Realistically though, when you factor in attendee interaction with the kiosks, the real processing rate is around 3.5 to 4.0 attendees per minute, per kiosk screen.
This means that the printer is largely under utilized when they are matched one to one to a laptop or tablet.
With our rental only solution we only offer one to one laptop to printer setups to make it as simple as possible for you to use.
However, with our assisted solution we install our own wired and wireless network which means we can share one printer with up to 3 laptops or kiosks.
This means that you get the most out of the printer, use less ink, and less badge rolls without compromising on speed and efficiency of your check-in process whilst improving your event’s overall carbon footprint.
This also translates into cheaper rental and shipping costs as you’re hiring less printers which greatly offsets the cost of the assisted part of this service. Typically, the uplift from rental only to assisted is very small that it becomes a no-brainer for you.
Want to see a price comparison?
Let’s assume that your event is expecting 1,000 attendees and is a single day. 80% of the attendees are expected within the first hour of your event starting.
At a rate of 3.5 attendee check-ins per minute, each kiosk screen can support approximately 210 attendees an hour.
That means in rental only mode you’re going to need 4 x laptop / tablets, 4 x scanners, and 4 x printers with consumables.
Remember, the printers can work faster (up to 8 badge prints per minute), so by networking them with multiple kiosk screens with our assisted product means we can operate 4 x laptop / tablets, 4 x scanners with 2 x printers with consumables.
| Rental Only | Assisted Badge Printing | ||
| Item | Cost | Item | Cost |
| 4 x Epson C3500 Printers | $1,800 | 2 x Epson C3500 Printers | $900 |
| 4 x Surface Go Tablets | $260 | 4 x Surface Go Tablets | $260 |
| 4 x QR Code Scanners | $60 | 4 x QR Code Scanners | $60 |
| 4 x Badge Label Box (500) | $580 | 2 x Badge Label Box (500) | $290 |
| 4 x Full ink set | $480 | 3 x Full ink set | $360 |
| 4 x Printer Maintenance Box | $140 | 2 x Printer Maintenance Box | $70 |
| Badge Printing Software | $750 | Badge Printing Software | $750 |
| 4 x Delivery Shipping | $1,000 | 2 x Delivery Shipping | $500 |
| 4 x Collection Shipping | $1,000 | 2 x Collection Shipping | $500 |
| Remote Support | $0 | Onsite Technician x 2 days | $1,200 |
| Estimated Expenses | $1,500 | ||
| Total | $6,070 | Total | $6,390 |
As you can see, for $300 more you benefit from the comfort of knowing all your registration technical requirements are covered, leaving you to concentrate on chasing your keynote speaker!
Fully Managed Onsite Badge Printing
Our final service is our full badge printing solution where we do everything for you including staffing your registration points.
This service is for you if you cannot rely on volunteers or don’t have the staff to designate to registration duties.
Instead, we provide the staffing including technical and front of house attendants that can wear your branded uniform or arrive in black bistro style apparel.
To ensure the cost of the service is affordable we operate a lean expert team and hire local workers through our global network of temporary event staff employment agencies to augment our team.
The technical team are our employees and are fully trained and experienced with our systems. We run a pre-day training workshop with local workers at our own cost to ensure that they understand their job, the system, and what to expect. They are also experienced front of house professionals who work in the event and hospitality trade.
Hiring local resources is an efficient way to deliver all-inclusive onsite badge printing services. It means we can hire by the hour so when the rush has passed, we let some of the team go off shift saving you money.
They also provide a cultural benefit, they know the local language and customs of people that enriches the first experience your attendees have of your event.
Using our full service gives you peace of mind that your registration and check-in process will run like clockwork.
We are our own developers. Unlike other providers who purchase their software from vendors, we develop our own.
We use our experience in the event industry (we’re event organizers too) to refine our product through real life experiences we live through as well as you.
Our badge printing software is one of the most reliable on the market with several layers of resilience built in. Each kiosk contains it’s own copy of your attendee ticket list that is refreshed every few seconds.
This makes the kiosks self sufficient in the event of a venue internet outage. They’ll continue to operate with their local copy until connectivity is restored. When it is, they’ll upload all pending check-in data and download a fresh copy from our servers.
This means your check-in system will never go down if your venue lets your down.
When you choose our assisted of fully managed solution you’ll also benefit from increased resilience as our network will fall back to 4G connectivity in over 78 different countries should your venue internet suffer an outage.
We have experienced it ourselves, you arrive on site and you’re missing an ink cartridge or an entire delivery of equipment. You check your tracking and discover there is a delay and it’s scheduled to arrive after you need it. It’s an awful, helpless feeling.
With us you don’t need to worry.
We ship our equipment worldwide on a weekly basis. We work exclusively with FedEx after extensive experience with other global logistics companies, we have found FedEx to be the most reliable and consistent courier that can support us.
We ship all our items to your venue ahead of time. Many venues will accept shipments from 7 days before your event. As we don’t charge you rental fees per day, we take the responsibility of ensuring our equipment arrives well in time for your event so we can take into account any unforeseen delays within the logistics and customs chain.
Our flight cases for the equipment are designed specifically to be transported with ease. They are also customs friendly if equipment is being transported across international borders so they aren’t delayed by inspections.
We work closely with FedEx and have all documentation prepared to ensure proper transit of the equipment without you needing to be involved in the customs process.
All equipment is fully serviced, cleaned, and tested before it is shipped. You will receive a copy of the dispatch note detailing everything that has been packed in. We will also include an extra set of inks just in case you either run out, or are unfortunate enough to receive a defective cartridge (it’s happened once before to ourselves fortunately. We learnt from that experience, so you don’t have to).
There is no reason beyond extreme mishandling whereby you’ll receive defective equipment.
If you’re concerned about this, we offer you the opportunity to rent an additional kiosk free of charge except for the cost of shipping and return. Therefore, giving you additional peace of mind that you have a readily available backup on site should you need it.
We know that when it comes to event badge printing, organizers often underestimate the cost of the service, and some companies will tailor their initial quote to you knowing this.
Their service can appear cheap and it’s only when you’ve signed your agreement with them that the true cost of the overall solution becomes apparent.
Here at Just Attend, we pride ourselves on being transparent from the start. Our quotes are true quotes, not estimates. They include everything you need and have asked for at a fixed price that will not change. If we get it wrong, that’s on us, not you.
When comparing our quotes to others be sure to check their quote for the following:
Also it is very important to understand that we listen to your requirements from the outset and will quote based on the materials and hardware you need to deliver an efficient badge printing service.
Other companies will simply quote you for what you ask for. But we know an organizer asking for one kiosk to print 500 badges onsite is just not going to work well for them. We will advise you on what we know will work well and then it will be down to you to make the decision on whether to up size or down size.
If you need a reliable event badge printing provider in Croatia, Serbia, Istanbul, Los Angeles, New York, or anywhere in between, we are your partner of choice. Let’s have a chat about how we can support you today and tomorrow.
Unique Attendees
Sessions Delivered
Exhibitor Leads Generated
Badges
Printed
