The stage has power. The catering has power. The AV team turned up with a van full of it and ran a cable to everything they own.
The front door has a phone on 41%.
That is the honest state of most check-in desks. Everything else at an event is plugged into a wall by someone whose job it is to plug things into walls, and the door runs on whatever charge the kit happened to have when it came out of the case. It works most of the time, which is exactly why nobody plans it. Then one October morning a scanner dies mid-queue and the whole thing becomes very visible.
The UK runs around 85 million event attendances a year across a sector employing 775,000 people, according to the UK Events Report 2025 published by UKEVENTS in December 2025. Every one of those attendances passes a door, and the door is nearly always the least powered part of the room.
Work out how long the day actually is
Ask most people how long the door needs to last and they will tell you the doors are open from nine until five, so eight hours.
The real number is longer. Kit comes out of the case at half seven for setup. Somebody uses a scanner to test the pass at quarter to eight. The tablet sits awake on the welcome screen from eight while the desk is dressed. Doors open at nine. The last stragglers arrive at half eleven, the desk goes quiet, the kiosk stays on, and at four o'clock somebody starts counting people out. Pack-down finishes at six.
That is ten and a half hours of screen-on time, not eight, and screen-on is what drains a device. A tablet running a kiosk screen at full brightness in a bright foyer will not see the end of that on one charge. Nor will a phone that has been scanning, with the camera live, since eight in the morning.
Plan for the setup-to-pack-down number and the maths gets much less optimistic, which is the point.
Know which of your devices is the weak one
Not everything at the door drains at the same rate, and it helps to know the order in which things will fail.
The scanner phones go first, because the camera and the screen are both working and the device never gets a rest between guests. A dedicated wedge scanner lasts far longer than a phone doing the same job, because it is doing one thing with a small screen or none at all. Tablets on kiosk duty sit somewhere in the middle: the screen is always on, but it is idle between guests.
Badge printers are the awkward one. They are usually mains-powered, so they are not a battery problem, they are a socket problem, and a socket problem in a foyer with two working plugs is worse.
Write the order down once for your own kit. The point is not precision, it is knowing at half past ten which device you should be watching.
Two chargers, not one
The single most useful thing you can put in a front-door kit case is a second charging setup, and the second most useful thing is a battery pack per scanning device.
The pattern that works is rotation. Half the scanning phones are out on the floor, half are on charge behind the desk, and they swap over at a fixed time rather than when someone notices a red battery icon. Set the swap for a quiet moment, normally about forty minutes after the arrival peak has passed, and it stops being a decision anyone has to make under pressure.
Battery packs are better than wall sockets for this, because they let a device charge while it is still being used. A steward can carry a pack in a pocket with a short cable and keep scanning. That is not elegant, but at half eleven on a busy door nobody is grading you on elegance.
Bring more cables than devices, and bring the right ones. A kit case with four scanners and one cable is a kit case with one scanner.
Ask the venue about sockets before the day
Venues are used to answering questions about power for the stage. They are not used to answering them about the door, because most people do not ask.
Ask anyway, and ask specifically: how many sockets are within reach of where the check-in desk will stand, and are they on a circuit that gets switched off. A surprising number of foyer sockets are cleaner's sockets on a timer. If the answer is one socket behind a pillar six metres away, you know now, and you can bring a properly rated extension lead and tape rather than discovering the problem while a queue forms.
Two other things worth confirming: whether you may run a cable across a walkway at all, and if so whether the venue requires its own cable matting. Some do, and turning up without it means your printer stays in the case.
If you are doing a site visit anyway, this is a two-minute question that saves an hour.
Kiosks need a plan of their own
A kiosk is the device most likely to be left running unattended, which makes it the device most likely to be found dark.
If the kiosk is going to run all day, it needs mains power, full stop. A tablet on a stand with a cable run down the stand leg and taped at the floor is the setup that survives a long day. Running one on battery alone works for a two-hour drinks reception and not much longer.
While you are at it, turn the screen timeout off and set the brightness deliberately rather than leaving it on automatic. A kiosk that has dimmed itself in a bright foyer looks broken, and guests will walk past a screen they think is broken and queue at the staffed desk instead, which defeats the entire purpose of having put it there.
Make it survive going flat anyway
Sooner or later something goes flat despite all of it, so the useful question is what happens next.
The answer should be that a steward picks up a different device, signs in, and carries on from the same list. That only works if the check-in runs from a shared record rather than something held on the device, and if crew have their own logins so a replacement device is a thirty-second swap rather than a hunt for whoever knows the password.
It also means the number stays right. If the count lives on one tablet and the tablet dies, you have lost the count. If it lives centrally, you have lost a tablet, which is an inconvenience rather than an incident.
Test this once, deliberately, before the season starts. Check a few guests in, take the device away mid-queue, and hand somebody else a fresh one. You will find out in five minutes whether your setup handles it.
The short version
Four things, none of which take long:
Count the real day from case-open to pack-down, not from doors to close. Put a battery pack with every scanning device and rotate them on a schedule rather than on a warning. Ask the venue about sockets near the desk, and bring your own lead. Make sure any device can be swapped for another one without losing the list or the count.
Power is the least interesting part of running a door, which is precisely why it is the part that gets left to chance. It is also one of the few problems at an event that is entirely solvable the week before.
CheckInHub keeps the guest list, the check-in count and the equipment log in one place, so a flat battery costs you a device and not your numbers. See how it works at the door.
