With NADA Show 2025 quickly approaching, the National Automobile Dealers Association is already planning for the future, working on determining the site for the big event … in 2041.

“I actually have dates on hold for 2041 that I’m getting ready to lock in,” said NADA senior vice president of meetings, conventions and expositions Melissa Wolpert, who heads the show’s logistics and operations. “So, it’s like, ‘Where am I going to be in 2041?’

“It’s kind of a running joke for us when we we’re talking about something, what year are you talking about? I’m always asking myself, ‘What year am I in? Am I in ’25, ’26, ’27 or ‘32 or ‘35 or …?’ ”

Indeed, putting on the biggest show in the auto industry is a seemingly endless task. As preparations for one show reach the home stretch, the work on another is just beginning, while many others are in various stages along the way.

Take the 2025 show, for example.

It will run Jan. 23-26, but the space at New Orleans’ Ernest N. Morial Convention Center was booked 10 years in advance.

That’s necessary, Wolpert said, because of the sheer size of the NADA event — some 22,000 attendees are expected, with more than 600 events, sessions and meetings on the agenda, and more than 500 companies exhibiting in an expo hall that covers somewhere in the vicinity of 700,000-800,000 square feet.

“We need over a million square feet total,” she explained. “So when you have a show of our size — and there’s only like five cities we can go to — we have to place holds early.”

Once the convention center was secured, NADA’s event team began working on hotel space.

“Our headquarters hotel and our larger big boxes, if you will, of a thousand rooms or more get booked about five years out,” Wolpert said. “The entire citywide hotel package gets booked by two years out. We book more than 11,000 rooms on peak night, so we have about 44 hotels.

“Then 18 months out is when we start to design the expo floor plan and the sponsorship plan. We do our logistical site visit one year out, our first one, and that’s where we meet with every department because, you know, every convention center is different. We go through everything and where everything is assigned and all that good stuff.”

At nine months out, she said, expo sales begin, along with the room block and function space requests for hotels. Attendee registration and housing opens at the six month mark.

And while all that is going on, Wolpert said, “I was just finishing up ‘27 and we’re already working on our large event for Vegas in ’26. So we always have many shows working at any given time.”

Wolpert and her staff are constantly busy working to make each NADA Show a success. There is an enormous number of moving parts to put in place and tasks to complete — most of which go unnoticed by attendees, but would be glaring if they weren’t done.

That includes setting up a hotel package to accommodate the crowd of dealers, OEM representatives and vendors. The staff visits every hotel to make the contract with to make sure they “meet the standards of our members,” Wolpert said. “We are unique in that we require as many high-end hotel rooms as we can get — which can be a challenge, depending on what city you’re going to.

“It’s a lot easier in a city such as Las Vegas because of the size of the hotels, but then again, they’re a lot harder to negotiate with in Las Vegas. But you can go to other cities and you struggle with getting the quality you need.”

There’s also the logistical nightmare of assigning and setting up all those meeting, workshop and expo booth spaces — and not just in the conference venue.

“A lot of our exhibitors need function space in hotels,” Wolpert said. “That can be very challenging to get the amount of function space we need for their events because we assign over 200 functions for just our exhibitors and our affiliates.”

To get the spaces ready for all those functions, among many other aspects of the show, NADA works with vendors of all sorts — decorating, security, shuttle, audio-visual and many others you probably would never think of.

“Our food and beverage, our electrical, our registration and housing company … We book and they cook,” Wolpert said. “We book everything but they take care of all of the blocking of our hotels and all the registrations for the exhibitors and all the 22,000 attendees that get badged.

“So we’re kind of a nucleus management company, if you will, for all of our vendors. We hire all of them and we manage all of them. We basically give them instructions on what to do. … So everything that you see at the show has an order to it, and you can imagine how many event orders that is.

“I could go on and on and on,” she said with a smile.

Of course, for all the unseen parts of the show, there are some that are very visible.

The expo hall is certainly one of them. That giant floor space will be packed with “booths” that are more like monumental structures featuring high-tech displays and demos for potential customers.

“The audio-visual and the technology is always growing,” Wolpert said of the booths. “We actually have more bandwidth than the Consumer Electronics Show — which is kind of hard to believe, but that’s what I’ve been told by Las Vegas. They’ve got all their displays ready to go.

“Every time you think it couldn’t get any prettier you go to the next show and it’s even prettier. It’s one of the prettiest exhibit floors you’ll ever see.”

Like everything else connected with the NADA Show, getting all of those displays set up doesn’t happen overnight.

In fact, the process starts on the Saturday and Sunday before the show begins, when the expo floor is marked with each booth’s number and its boundaries. That’s the beginning of seven intense days of construction and organization, culminating with the expo opening at 10 a.m. Friday.

“When the freight starts coming in everything’s targeted, so you might have 10 targets that come in before official move-in starts, because of the size of their booth,” Wolpert said. “Then they start layering in as far as where they’re located on the floor. There’s usually a pecking order in terms of aisle traffic and the way the freight comes in. And it takes up until the morning that it opens.

“We contract about five days for move-in and three days to move out, because obviously it takes longer to go up and it comes down a lot faster.”

If the expo is the heart of the NADA Show, it shares that distinction with the education agenda, which for 2025 includes more than 100 sessions.

Putting that together each involves a process Wolpert described as “very intense,” which begins in March and runs through June, when the show committee, working with NADA’s dealership operations team, begins fine-tuning the session titles and descriptions until the content is launched in October.

“We obviously review evaluations from the previous show,” she said. “We have subject matter experts who review and also submit invited speakers we should look at, as well as identifying the hot topics that should be covered. We make a list of all the things we think need to be covered, and meet with our subject matter experts.

“All the sessions that are submitted are rated through a rating system by our technology. We always just want to make sure we have what’s relevant, what’s new and what’s next and be ahead of the curve for education.”

The 2025 agenda is highlighted by a couple of big names on the main stage — Hall of Fame basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski on Sunday and comedian Frank Caliendo on Saturday. But Wolpert’s choice for a must-see session is the opening main-stage speaker: author and executive coach Ryan Leak, who will appear at 8:45 a.m. Friday.

“Ryan Leak is not a very well-known speaker, but if you follow him on social you’ll find he’s very inspirational as a leadership coach,” Wolpert said. “I think he will be really great, inspirational, talking about leadership and where you want to be in your business.

“He’ll get people jazzed about the auto industry just before we open the exhibit floor.”

Not that they’ll need help getting jazzed after the NADA Show’s biggest event.

The night before Leak hits the stage, NADA will hold the extravaganza that is the opening welcome reception, which the association is calling “part jazz fest, part bayou bash — with all the flair of NOLA.”

The massive opening event might be Wolpert’s biggest undertaking and greatest challenge each year, with multiple levels of food and drink, entertainment and countless details that require attention.

It begins with the venue. In recent years, NADA’s big event has been held in Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium, Gilley’s in Dallas and in 2024, the Sphere in Las Vegas, which Wolpert said, “I lovingly like to call the Death Star” because of the huge logistical challenges it presented as a brand-new facility.

For the upcoming show in New Orleans, Wolpert’s first thought was the Superdome — except two weeks after NADA, that stadium is hosting a little thing called the Super Bowl, making it unavailable.

“We’re coming out from the Sphere, and how do you compete with that?” she said. “Well, you can’t compete with the Sphere. You have to completely build and put together a whole new event and experience and focus on the future. So that’s what we’re doing.”

Indeed, when Wolpert said NADA is completely building the event, she wasn’t kidding. The show is taking over a venue called The Sugar Mill and the adjacent Mississippi River Heritage Park to create a tent city for the sprawling reception.

“We’re bringing in generators and power and tents, and we’re building a luxury city within the Sugar Mill,” she said. “And I’m talking about a luxurious tent. … I mean, we’re even flooring it because that’s how we roll. We can’t just do like a tent and have the asphalt there.”

The vibe, Wolpert said, is “Louisiana Luxe”, with a French Quarter-themed area with dueling pianos, shrimp and grits flame-boiled right in front of you, bananas foster. “A spot to go get away and relax,” she said.

But that’s just part of the three-tiered event.

“It’s like a festival and I have not planned a festival before, so this is a first. And it’s been so much fun because we have partnered with the best of the best in the hospitality industry, which we’re very passionate about. … It’s going to be spectacular.”

The theme is New Orleans in all its facets, featuring the food, music and atmosphere of the Crescent City. In addition to the Sugar Mill, there will be “more of a voodoo swamp feel” in the courtyard, and Heritage Park will be home to a large stage with the feel of the famous New Orleans Jazz Fest, with Trombone Shorty as the featured performer. And it’s no exaggeration to say that area will offer a taste of the real jazz fest, as Wolpert’s team actually attended that event, sampled the food and hired some of the vendors.

“We’ll have Crawfish Monica,” she said. “We are really bringing in the flavor of New Orleans as an authentic New Orleans event.”

And now Wolpert’s game day is approaching. After all the months and years of preparation, the Show is about to go on.

Her team of 12 will have lots of help on site. Wolpert said some 120 NADA staff from all departments will be on hand to help the operation run smoothly. She’ll be managing more than 100 vendor partners to handle all the details.

“It’s all hands on deck,” she said, “to showcase all the things NADA can do, showcase our products and services, as well as making sure our dealers know all the things that are going on in the industry.”

Once she arrives for the show, Wolpert’s days are a constant swirl of activity. There’s always something going, always fires to be put out — figuratively, of course.

“What is it like for me? Well, I would say it’s exciting. I mean, I live for the chaos. We thrive in chaos. They say we are chaos coordinators. And if you know you know, you know. But in all seriousness, it’s the best part. One of the best things for a show producer is coming on site and seeing it all go up and seeing all your hard work and your team’s hard work come to fruition, and the energy our show has.

“I’ve worked for a few different associations, and this event is like no other. The energy is just wonderful. I love the auto industry. I love the energy it brings. It definitely gets you excited when you’re on site and see all the connections being made, and that that was done by you guys all coming together and putting this event on for them to connect. It’s what it’s all about.

“Oh yeah, it’s long days, but the rewards are big.”