I just got back from CES last night, and this happened to a vendor I had an appointment with.
We were on the 30th floor of the Venetian. The CEA (Consumer Electronics Association, the entity that puts on CES) arranges to take complete floors for things that make noise - they had the 29th, the 30th and the 32nd along with parts of the 34th and 35th and probably others. We make noise, we're selling high end home/corporate theater sound systems and the demos exceed 100 dB at certain points, so combined with the traffic there's no way any regular guest would be happy there. Each room gets a sign to tell other attendees who is there, the doors are generally left wide open and music (and bodies) permeate the hallways all day.
As a point of reference the room cost, paid to the CEA directly, is about $20K for about a week (including setup before the show and teardown afterward), and there are lots of other costs as well. The cost is a serious barrier to entry for smaller firms.
On Friday we were visited by a vendor offering a product that we use and need. I wanted to learn more, and they told me they were just upstairs on the 31st floor, gave me a card with their suite number, and we arranged to get together Saturday morning after a meeting I already had scheduled. I sent them a text message Saturday morning and didn't hear back until their salesman was back in our suite with an explanation.
It turns out that they had managed to book a room on that floor just above other CES exhibitors, had 16 cases of equipment brought up by the hotel staff, and had been bringing people in since the show opened. As they were in the hotel along with the other exhibitors I thought nothing of it and assumed they were just another exhibitor - but it turns our they had not gone through the CEA. Hotel security - and the local Sheriff according to them - took their stuff and them from the room & put them on the curb at 10:00 PM Friday night.
Now in this case they did confess to me that they pulled out the agreement that they signed when they checked in, and that agreement said they would not be making loud noises or conducting business - and they felt that since their products are still in the development stage they didn't count. They were told they had been discovered because they were doing music demonstrations in the room during show hours and people could hear it through the (closed) doors. Since they were not on a floor the CEA had taken 100% of for sound demos it was disturbing other guests and that's how they were discovered.
They ended up in another hotel, where I met them Sunday. I'll be curious to see if they were offered the chance to pay $10K to stay, which is about what a room the size of the one they had would have cost if they booked it properly although they would not have been in the program or on the signs.
