Load-in

The process of bringing equipment and materials into a venue, through a dock or elevator, at scheduled times.

How it works in practice

Every venue has a route from the street to the room, and the narrowest point on that route sets the rules. In downtown hotels it is usually the loading dock and the freight elevator. In lofts and heritage buildings it can be a single passenger elevator, a flight of stairs or a laneway with no parking. The venue assigns dock windows, and AV, florals, rentals, the band and the caterer may all be sharing the same two hours.

Load-in drives start times. If the dock opens at 08:00 and the truss and LED wall take five hours to build, nothing else goes into the room until early afternoon. Some venues use union crews for any handling inside the building, which adds labour minimums and fixed call times.

In Ontario and the GTA

Downtown Toronto hotels and convention spaces commonly book docks in fixed slots, and some require a certificate of insurance (COI) from each vendor before they are allowed in. Street loading on a weekday can mean ticketing or towing, so ask the venue where vans park after unloading. In our experience, lofts in the Distillery District and on King West often have the tightest access, and vendors price that in.

How to handle it

1. Ask the venue for the dock location, window, elevator size and weight limit, and any union rules.
2. Send those details to every vendor with their assigned slot.
3. Collect each vendor’s vehicle size, crew count and longest item. A 4.9 m piece of truss does not fit in every elevator.
4. Stagger arrivals in the production schedule, heaviest and overhead work first.
5. Put a person at the dock with the schedule for the first two hours.

Questions to ask

• Is the freight elevator shared with another function that day?
• Does the venue require a COI before load-in, and naming whom?
• Is there an early access fee if set-up starts before the contracted time?
• Where do empty cases go during the event?

Related tools

The venue tour checklist covers dock and elevator questions, and the performer tech rider template asks acts for load-in needs up front.