How art fairs are simplifying access for exhibitors' guests

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Handling exhibitors' guests can turn into a nightmare for art fairs team. Whilst having to control venue's capacity and track guests' access, they also need to please exhibitors, partners and advisors by being flexible, efficient and discrete.

Exhibitors like to maintain autonomy in managing invites and issuing last minute passes. Just a while ago, art fairs used to issue physical passes that were then distributed to high-end clientele locally or across the world, and most of them were sent by post. But can this system be truly sustainable in the global and digital world we're living in?

Well, clearly not, and arts professionals have promptly reacted to the digital challenges of the pandemic, introducing new tools to facilitate certain procedures. It is now a matter of adapting these tools to what both parts need.

The necessity of a more controlled access during the pandemic made art fairs and exhibitors having to take up more time in back and forth emails for updates and changes. Having to wait for art fair team's permission to let someone in can be very frustrating for an art dealer, who is trying to be impeccable for new sales. Besides, galleries may not want to hand over lists of their clients details to protect their privacy.

Membership portals and digital invitations can be great solutions to solve the problems outlined above and helped art fairs to keep everything under control while pleasing galleries.

There can be a better way

Digital invites allow event organisers and developers to improve the booking experience for their audience whilst retaining more control over who can book to attend. Invite links are perfect for members only or VIP events and allow event organisers to personalise the booking experience. When invites are personalised there is no need for guests to enter their name or email. The guest can simply select the time of the booking and indicate how many +1s they will have (if permitted). Personalising the booking experience allows brands to not only provide a more direct way to interact with their audience but it also saves the invited guest time.

View of ARTSVP invite experience

Request a demo for invite links

If you'd like a demo on how to make the best use of invite links, please get in touch on demo@artsvp.com

Multi use invites make it easy to manage numbers and provide partners, exhibitors and advisors with links to invite to their own guests. The perfect use case is generating a multi use invite for each of your partners, exhibitors that they can share to take a certain number of bookings each, setting up the limit on how many times a single invite link can be used to make bookings. This is designed to help fairs allow galleries to invite guests easily whilst still manage numbers.

How to create Multi-use invites on ARTSVP

In order to easily recognise the multi-use invites and check their status, ARTSVP gives the opportunity to use labels. In this way it will be straight forward to track the source of the invites using an internal reference.

What about those annoying last minute requests for passes?

Handling an art fair guest list, whether of VIPs, press, or general access' guests, requires a certain amount of flexibility, especially to control last minutes changes and requests. Sometimes it's hard to know where these come from, and you don't want to end up having problems in letting Usher, or Gwyneth Paltrow inside your event, right? And bear in mind: most of VIP guests will want the very first access, no matter what.

Golden invites provide a great solution for this type of situations in which you just can't say no to a last minute access request. They allow certain guests to book even if times are fully booked.

ARTSVP usually recommends to provide each gallery a numbered golden invite link for last minute people they want to let in quickly ignoring availability.

Golden Invites

Allow guests to book even if certain times are fully booked.

Golden Invites

Golden invites provide a great solution to control last minutes changes and requests, regardless of availability. They can be particularly helpful during an art fair when you're asked to let in a guest to which you just can't say no.