Technology at the Anaheim Convention Center

The building takes no deliveries

This catches people every year. The Anaheim Convention Center has no shipping and receiving area, no storage and no marshalling yard, and their own policies say so plainly: the center does not receive or ship event materials. Everything goes through the general service contractor your show appointed, and nothing may arrive before the first day of move-in. So there are two routes. Ship to the contractor's advance warehouse weeks ahead and pay material handling, or have a named person standing at your booth when the truck arrives. Equipment that turns up with nobody expecting it goes back on the truck, and you find out at 4pm on set-up day.

Internet comes from Smart City, and the free wifi is not it

Smart City Networks holds the exclusive on data at the ACC: exhibitor and show telecommunications, voice, internet, networking, cable TV, and even the physical act of pulling cable. There is free wifi across the campus and it is genuinely useful for checking email in a lobby. It is not what you run a registration desk on, or a payment terminal, or a demo that a vice president is watching. Order a wired drop from Smart City, order it before you arrive because on-site pricing is worse everywhere, and tell us if your machines need to keep working when the network does not. We can set them up to hold data locally and sync afterwards, which has saved more show mornings than any amount of bandwidth.

What Encore owns, and what you can bring yourself

Encore is the preferred AV provider and holds the exclusive on rigging in the Arena, the Ballroom, the meeting rooms, ACC North, and for general sessions in the exhibit halls when it is not a trade show. That exclusivity covers the banner rods and the rigging points. Anything hanging from the ceiling is theirs and belongs in your budget early. What it does not cover is the equipment people actually touch: laptops, iPads, phones, monitors on stands, printers for the show office. Those you can bring, and those are what we deliver. The rules do shift between a trade show in a hall and a general session in the same hall, so get your own space confirmed in writing rather than relying on what was true last year.

A 53-acre campus with no obvious front door

About 1.8 million square feet of function space, over a million of it exhibit halls, 99 meeting rooms and three ballrooms adding up to roughly 238,000 square feet. ACC North came with the 2017 expansion. Outside there is the 100,000-square-foot Grand Plaza sitting between the Hilton Anaheim and the Anaheim Marriott. The practical consequence of that size is that ACC North and Car Park 1 are reached from Katella Avenue while the main halls run south toward Convention Way, and arriving at the wrong end costs twenty minutes you will not have. Check your hall before you set off, and tell anyone delivering to you which one it is.

What we bring up from San Diego

Anaheim is 95 miles from our warehouse, which makes it a drive rather than a shipment: we deliver, set up, and come back for it. Machines are imaged to your build before they leave here, so what lands at your booth is ready to switch on rather than a pallet and an afternoon. Registration iPads go out supervised and locked to your app, with spares as standard, because something always gets dropped. We collect at the end too, which matters more than it sounds at eleven at night on strike day.

The hotels on the plaza

The Hilton Anaheim and the Anaheim Marriott are both a short walk, with the Grand Plaza between them, and thousands of rooms sit within walking distance of the campus. Board meetings, press rooms and hospitality suites usually end up in one of those two while the show runs in the halls. We deliver to the hotel and the show floor on the same run, which saves a second delivery charge and a second set of arrangements.

Four questions your exhibitor manual should answer

Most of what matters is decided by your show rather than by the building, and the manual overrides general advice, including ours. Before you order anything, make sure you can answer these:

• Who is the general service contractor, and what is the advance warehouse address?
• Which day and hours is our move-in, and which dock?
• What internet did the show order, and is it wired or wireless?
• Is there overnight security, or does equipment come off the floor each night?

Where these details came from

The City of Anaheim's facility guide, event policies and 2025-26 rate schedule, read in September 2026. Venues change providers and shows change rules, so confirm anything you are budgeting against with your event manager. If something here has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it.