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Art fair season has a habit of arriving all at once.
Between shipping works, finalising stand plans, confirming collectors, organising VIP dinners and keeping track of an ever-growing diary of previews and events, guest management can easily become another spreadsheet — or several — on an already very long to-do list.
Whether you’re heading to London, Paris, Miami or your next fair further afield, a little preparation can make the difference between simply getting through fair week and making the most of every opportunity it brings.
So, before the doors open: is your gallery art-fair ready?
Here’s the ARTSVP checklist.
The checklist at a glance
- Get your guest lists in order
- Make your invitations feel personal
- Know where your guests are coming from
- Plan beyond the fair stand
- Put your public events on the fair-week map
- Make the door as considered as the invitation
- Don’t lose the value of the event afterwards
✓ Get your guest lists in order
Fair-week guest lists rarely come from one place.
There are collectors the gallery director wants to invite, institutional contacts, press, artists’ guests, partners and prospects — often managed by different members of the team.
Bring those audiences together before the week begins. With ARTSVP Pro and Expert, contacts can be organised into lists and tags, while personal invitations and different booking links all feed into the same live guest list for the event.
Before the fair
Consolidate your key contacts
Create VIP, press, collector and partner lists
Decide who within the gallery is responsible for each audience
Make sure the whole team knows where the live guest list lives
✓ Make your invitations feel personal
During art fair season, inboxes get extremely busy. A collector receiving dozens of invitations doesn’t need another generic mailout.
For the people who matter most, keep it personal.
ARTSVP Pro and Expert allow galleries to create individual invitations for named guests. Each guest receives their own personal link to respond, and galleries can either send the invitation through ARTSVP or copy the link and share it through their usual one-to-one channels, including personal email or WhatsApp.
That means the relationship stays personal while the administration happens centrally behind the scenes.
“ARTSVP has made a significant change in the way we facilitate VIP bookings. The process is more personalised and efficient, and their team couldn’t be more helpful.” — Elizabeth Cocco, VIP Relations, NADA
Before you hit send
Identify the guests who warrant a personal invitation
Test the invitation yourself
Check the experience on mobile
Consider sending key VIP links personally from a director or gallery contact
Personal where it matters. Organised behind the scenes.
✓ Know where your guests are coming from
Your fair-week audience might be coming through your newsletter, Instagram, an artist, a gallery director, a partner or a fair campaign.
Instead of sending everyone through the same route, Pro and Expert galleries can create separate booking links for different channels and tag them accordingly. Each route can then be tracked within the event.
Set up links for
Gallery newsletter
Social media
Individual directors or teams
Artists
Partners
VIP or collector outreach
It turns “we had a busy event” into much more useful information about what actually brought people through the door.
✓ Plan beyond the fair stand
Some of the most valuable conversations of fair week don’t happen at the fair itself.
Collector breakfasts, artist dinners, exhibition openings, talks, private views and informal drinks all give galleries more time with their audiences, away from the intensity of the stand.
Create these events in advance and think about the right guest journey for each. A private collector dinner needs a very different approach from an open exhibition preview — and ARTSVP allows personal invitations and wider booking links to work on the same event where needed.
Ask yourself
What are we doing around the fair, not just at it?
Which events are invitation-only?
Which should reach a wider audience?
Do we need capacity limits or a waitlist?
What guest information do we genuinely need to collect?
✓ Put your public events on the fair-week map
Fair week isn’t only about your own guest list. Collectors, curators and art lovers arrive in the city looking for what to see beyond the fair — and the right listing puts your opening, talk or late view in front of people who don’t know your gallery yet.
Art Week Guide is a free, curated guide to the art weeks happening around the world, promoted to an audience of more than 20,000 collectors, curators and art enthusiasts. The Frieze Week 2026 guide brings together the fairs, shows, talks, performances and parties taking place across London from 12 to 18 October, with Paris Art Week following straight after.
Listing an event is free, and ARTSVP events are the quickest to add. Paste your ARTSVP event link into the submission form and your event details and images come across automatically. In the new ARTSVP admin, you can also open your event’s Promote tab and choose Publish to Art Week Guide.
Every submission is reviewed before it appears on the guide, so submit early.
Before you submit
Choose the public events you want a wider audience to find
Keep invitation-only events off public listings
Publish each event in ARTSVP first
Add a strong image and a short, clear description
Check the date, time and address
Submit to Art Week Guide early, so there is time for review
✓ Make the door as considered as the invitation
You’ve spent weeks getting people there. Don’t let the welcome become the stressful part.
Replace printed lists and competing spreadsheets with one live guest list that the whole team can access. ARTSVP’s Check-in Mode works in a browser on phones, tablets and laptops, while Pro and Expert also support QR scanning. Walk-ins can be added and checked in on the spot.
Before doors open
Brief your front-of-house team
Decide who has check-in access
Test the guest list on the devices you’ll actually use
Have a plan for walk-ins and +1s
Make sure VIPs can be found quickly
✓ Don’t lose the value of the event afterwards
The event isn’t over when the last guest leaves.
One of the most useful distinctions ARTSVP gives galleries is between the people who were invited, the people who confirmed and the people who actually attended. That activity stays part of each guest’s event history within ARTSVP, and guest lists can be exported or connected to wider workflows through the API and webhooks where appropriate.
After the fair
Review who actually attended
Follow up with priority collectors and prospects
Export useful guest information for your wider systems
Review which invitation routes generated engagement
Keep useful audience groups ready for your next event
Because the best fair-week guest list shouldn’t disappear into a spreadsheet with so many versions that no one is sure which one is the latest.
“It’s ideal for busy galleries — you can create an event, send invites and get everything set up really simply, without having to overthink it.” — George Mingozzi-Marsh, Director, Amici Studio
Your art fair toolkit
If events are a regular part of your gallery programme, ARTSVP Pro adds personal invitations, gallery branding and contact management to ARTSVP’s core event, booking, guest-list and check-in tools. Expert is designed for larger, higher-volume and more complex organisations, and adds custom fields, automations, managed portals and API access. Both currently come with a seven-day free trial.
ㅤ | Free | Pro | Expert |
Events, bookings, live guest list and Check-in Mode | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Publish to Art Week Guide | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Personal invitations | — | ✓ | ✓ |
Contact lists and tags | — | ✓ | ✓ |
Separate booking links for each channel | — | ✓ | ✓ |
QR scanning at the door | — | ✓ | ✓ |
Gallery branding | — | ✓ | ✓ |
Custom fields, automations, managed portals and API access | — | — | ✓ |
Related reading: Surviving (and thriving) at art weeks