Booth, flights, visas, shipping, and four people out of delivery for a week. Here's the real arithmetic, and the version of this channel that works.
The bill nobody adds up
Everyone budgets the booth. Almost nobody budgets the week of delivery capacity, which is usually the largest line item and never appears on a spreadsheet.
Add flights, visas, hotels at exhibition-week rates, stand build, shipping, collateral, and the two weeks of follow-up that should happen and usually doesn't.
The channel works. The way most firms run it doesn't.
Why it still beats almost everything
A buyer who walks onto your stand has budget, a timeline and a problem they've already admitted to. That's a qualification standard no outbound sequence reaches.
The failure isn't the show. It's that the people who collected the cards went straight back into client work the Monday they landed, and the pipeline evaporated in a fortnight.
The version that works
Book meetings before you go, using the exhibitor directory. Send fewer people. Decide in advance who owns follow-up and protect their calendar for the two weeks afterwards. And pick smaller vertical shows over famous general ones more often than you'd think.