Booth Planner: Shifts, Sessions, and Schedules

Updated October 10, 2026·Planning a Conference·Share on X

The Booth Planner is where you turn a list of attendees into a real plan for the event days: who staffs the booth when, which sessions the team is covering, and what each person's day looks like. Open a conference and go to the Booth Planner tab.

The Booth Planner is team scheduling. It is different from the Meetings page, which handles one-on-one meetings with leads. Keep the two straight: Booth Planner is your crew's schedule, Meetings is your lead calendar.

Schedule blocks

Everything on the planner is a block on a day. A block has a type, a time range, and one or more assignees. Each day runs from midnight to midnight in the conference's time zone, so a 6 PM reception stays on the day it happens. Common block types:

Booth shift - who is working the booth during a window.
Session - a talk, keynote, or workshop the team is attending.
Meal, travel, setup, teardown - the logistics around the booth.

Because a block can have multiple assignees, you can put three people on the morning rush and one on the quiet afternoon. Assignees can be team members or Event Staff, so contractors and booth crew show up on the schedule without a login or a paid seat.

Adding blocks

Click a time slot or use Add Activity. The activity window works like the meeting window: pick the type, the day and time with the same date and time picker, the team members, and any leads. Every new activity needs at least one assigned team member before you can save it. Only people attending the conference can be assigned, so add them on the conference Overview tab first. Times are handled in the conference's local timezone, so nobody has to do timezone math in their head. The window shows that time zone above the time lists, and when yours is different it also shows what the activity works out to in your own time.

Finding a time for everyone

Once you've picked the team members, click Find a time for everyone (or Find a free time for one person). It lists the slots when every one of them is free on the conference days, from 7 AM to 8 PM in the conference's time zone. Each slot is at least as long as the activity you set (30 minutes until you pick an end time). Click one to fill in the day and time.

Busy means another Booth Planner activity, a meeting they own, or, when they connected their personal calendar, anything on it (only busy and free, never what the event is). Event Staff and people without a connected calendar are checked against the Booth Planner and their meetings only, and the panel names them. People's own business hours are ignored here, because your crew may live in different time zones.

Activities with leads

Add leads to an activity to turn it into a meeting with them. Pick an Owner from the assigned team members: the activity goes on the owner's personal calendar, and the window tells you which calendar that is. To email the leads a calendar invite, the owner ticks Email a calendar invite to invited leads. It's off by default, and only the owner can send it. The same invite rules as meetings apply, including on edits: leads who already have the invite get updates, removed leads get a cancellation, and changing the owner lets you keep the invite where it is or move it. When leads reply to the invite, their Attendance updates to Accepted or Declined on its own; you mark Attended or No-show after the event. See "Who's coming" in meetings.

Activities without leads are team time (booth shifts, sessions, travel). They never invite anyone.

Clicking an activity with leads opens it in the meeting panel on the right, where you can see who's coming, mark it as happened, or open a lead. Click Edit in Booth Planner there to change it in the activity window. Activities without leads open straight in the activity window. See opening a meeting.

Every activity, with or without leads, also shows on the shared workspace calendar if your admin connected one. That calendar has no guests, so an activity with leads appears there as well as on the owner's calendar, and no one is emailed from it. If an activity you added is missing there, an Admin can press Sync Now under Integrations → Workspace Calendar; any error from Google or Outlook shows on that card.

The card at the top of the Booth Planner, under the timezone, shows which workspace calendar the schedule syncs to (Google or Outlook, and the account it lives in), whether a sync setting is turned off, and the last sync problem if there was one. The add and edit window says whether that activity gets a copy there.

Unassigned activities

If you take someone off a conference's attending list while they still have planned activities, Conference Hero warns you first and lists what they're on. If you go ahead, those activities stay on the schedule but lose that person. Anything with nobody left on it shows in an Unassigned column on the Team Grid, so nothing quietly disappears. Open one and pick a new team member to hand it over. The column only appears on days that have unassigned activities. Sessions or activities that run at the same time sit side by side on the Team Grid instead of on top of each other.

Sessions and the catalog

Click Add Sessions next to Add Activity to open the session catalog. Sessions are listed by day, earliest first. Add Session and Import Sessions sit at the top; each opens in its own window, and so does editing a session. The form shows the conference dates and highlights them in the calendar. If you pick a day outside them, you get a warning, but you can still save. Add a session by hand, or, since conference agendas are long, use Import Sessions instead of typing every one: upload the agenda (PDF, spreadsheet, or document) and click Extract with AI. Review what it found, untick anything you don't want, and click Import to add them to the catalog. Then add the ones your team is covering to the schedule as session blocks. This reuses the same document-reading engine as the AI Task Planner.

Adding or editing a session by hand uses the same date and time picker as activities, limited to the conference days and in the conference's time zone. Imported sessions keep the times printed in the agenda, read in the conference's time zone.

Pick team members in the session form and the session goes on their schedule as one session block. Editing the session later updates that same block: a new time, title, or room carries over, and adding or removing people changes who is on it. Saving never adds a second copy, and taking everyone off removes the block. If you renamed the block or changed its time by hand, it keeps your change.

To delete a session, open it and click Delete session at the bottom of the window (on a phone it's the trash icon). The session comes off the planner, and so does its session block on your team's schedules. Activities with leads stay, since those are meetings.

Exporting printable schedules

Booth crews want paper, not a login. Export a clean PDF in four formats:

Master schedule - the whole team's day on one sheet.
Personal agenda - one person's blocks, for handing to each staffer.
Timeline - a time-ordered view of the day.
Activity list - sessions and blocks merged into a single chronological list.

Exports are formatted for US Letter with readable type and color-coded block types that match the on-screen badges. You can export a single day or several days at once. Times in the PDF and the Excel export are in the conference's time zone, as on screen.