How do you plan registration and guest teams for a fan event?

By the We Are Play team · October 2026

Fan events don’t fill up gradually. They arrive. People have travelled across the country, some in costume they finished at 2am, and they want to be inside before the person next to them. Plan for that wave and the rest of the day gets easier.

Total attendance matters less than how people arrive. At the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival in October 2023, Square Enix needed every one of 6,000 visitors scanned, wristbanded and handed a goody bag and booklet between 8am and 10am on the Saturday, then walked through the whole show floor to the keynote.

So we planned the check-in team around those two hours, with thirteen on scanners. Once the rush cleared, 32 of the team moved straight onto the Battle Challenge, one of the busiest experiences in the hall. Check-in staff can move to other jobs once the rush has passed.

Pre-registered fans with a ticket on their phone are quick. Everyone else is slow: media collecting passes, cosplayers with props to check, guests with access needs, exhibitors, VIPs, walk-ups. Put them all in the main line and everyone waits.

At ExCeL a desk of four handled media, cosplayers and access needs separately, so the scanner lines kept moving. If a group collects something different at the door, it probably needs its own desk.

If a group collects something different at the door, give it its own desk.

Whatever you scan with, get the team on it before the doors open. Scanners that won’t pair, a list that hasn’t synced, a wristband colour nobody mentioned: these are the things that turn a two-hour window into three. Agree in advance what happens when a ticket doesn’t scan, and who can override it. The person on the scanner should never have to decide alone whether to let someone in.

After the doors, give every area its own team, its own brief and someone in charge of it. At ExCeL the hall was laid out as three in-game cities, and we ran a team for each, a 29-strong merch team, check-in, and a host and a marshal on every queue. Each team leader knew their patch of floor in detail and had a radio to the event manager.

Fan events run long and nobody can leave a scanner or a queue unattended for a break. At ExCeL we booked more people than the brief asked for and paid for the extras ourselves, so every area had spare hands to rotate breaks, with paid reserves on standby. That is our 105% staffing compliance.

Brief welfare as carefully as the doors: accessible routes, quiet spaces, and the venue’s procedure for lost or vulnerable people, so the team can send someone to the right place in seconds.

“In general the staff was so wholesome.”