We've been struggling for a good way to manage exhibitor registration for years. Quickly, our membership can be individual or corporate. Individuals join on their own, or receive member benefits through the conference. If you are a corporate member, you can designate a number of individuals to receive member benefits. Discounted registration to our annual conference is a member benefit. We use netFORUM Enterprise edition.
Our business practice allows exhibitors to register two personnel per 100 sq. ft. of space complimentary and pay for any additional personnel beyond those at the member or nonmember rates. Membership status is based on whether the person is a paying individual member, or they are one of their company's designated members.
We use a2z Show to sell exhibit space. On a nightly basis, the booth sales from a2z flow back into netforum including square footage. A staff member identifies new exhibiting companies and gives one of their employees a relationship type of Exhibitor POC in netforum. We are using ExpoLogic for booth personnel registration. The ExpoLogic integration assigns the Exhibitor POC a limited number of complimentary badges based on the square footage in the a2z order table. When the person with the Exhibitor POC relationship type clicks on the link to register for the conference, they are logged into eweb, then sent over to ExpoLogic's site seamlessly. They can see see the number of complimentary badges they have, and all the individuals related to their company so they can assign badges to them, complimentary or paid at the member/nonmember rate.
We opened this to the masses a couple weeks ago and have gotten good reviews so far. The only difficulty is that all new companies have to be manually added in netforum, their record number manually added back to a2z and the POC person assigned. But, that's a pretty minimal effort compared to some solutions we've used in the past.