Short answer: yes, it can. Article 26 of the Turkish Code of Obligations lets parties set the content of a contract freely within the limits the law draws, and no rule obliges a hotel or an exhibition centre to let an outside supplier into its own premises. Limits exist, but they are narrow. Competition law only bites where the venue holds a dominant position, and for standard printed contracts the general terms provisions of the Code of Obligations give you some protection. The Turkish Competition Authority's 2019 sector inquiry into the exhibition business found this practice widespread and recommended that venue operators replace the obligation with an approval mechanism built on objective criteria. The argument is won at the table before signature, not in court. What follows: what counts as a mandatory ancillary service, where technical approval is legitimate, which outside supplier charges to ask for, and the lines to get written into the contract.
Can the venue insist on its own audio and lighting crew?
Legally, yes. The venue operates its own premises and decides who enters on what terms, and the freedom of contract in article 26 of the Code of Obligations covers that. The real question is not whether it can insist, but what you signed. In practice the obligation rarely sits in the body of the main agreement. It lives in annexes called technical specifications, installation rules or supplementary protocols, and it is often not shared at the quotation stage. A second distinction matters just as much. A list of recommended companies and a clause saying you may only buy from those companies are two different animals. The Authority's sector inquiry found both patterns, with venue operators requiring services to be bought from their own group companies, from companies they had agreements with, or from companies they designated. The sentence to use on a site visit is short: may we see the full contract with every annex, plus the ancillary service price list.
Which items count as mandatory ancillary services?
The 2019 sector inquiry defines ancillary services as the ones an event cannot run without, used before, during and after it: security, cleaning, food and beverage, loading, unloading and handling, installation of audio and video systems, and stand design and build. The middle of that list is where an event producer lives, because audio and video installation is named inside the definition. The report also records what inspectors found in the field. Reading venue allocation contracts and participation contracts, they saw that venue operators imposed this obligation for most ancillary services, and that organisers then passed the same obligation down to exhibitors through participation contracts. Organisers raised three objections: higher costs, no freedom to choose the supplier, and service quality and speed that can drop. On the stand side there was a fourth, that designs which should vary with the character of the fair could no longer be realised on the floor.
Will competition law rescue you?
Usually not. Article 6 of Law No. 4054 lists making the purchase of one good or service conditional on buying another as a form of abuse, but the article only operates where the venue is dominant, and the sector report states plainly that tying is a common commercial practice which in most cases has no restrictive effect. There is a concrete example. An exhibition organiser refused approval to a stand building company and kept it out of a 2020 fair; the Competition Board rejected the complaint unanimously in decision 20-32/396-178 of 2 July 2020, reasoning that a single fair was not indispensable for competing in stand installation services. Türkiye was holding between 475 and 499 fairs a year in that period. The opposite outcome also happens. In decision 16-35/604-269 of 27 October 2016 the Board fined the operator of Congresium in Ankara 268,042.77 lira for abusing its dominant position by refusing to contract with an exhibition organiser; the annulment case failed and the Thirteenth Chamber of the Council of State upheld the result conclusively on 26 April 2022. Dominance is what separates the two files, and a hotel ballroom rarely clears that bar.
Is a technical approval requirement legitimate? Yes, so be ready for it
The same Board decision describes the organiser's role in detail: it sets technical criteria and notifies them to exhibitors, checks compliance before installation, issues the approval, lets approved firms into the hall, and keeps inspecting during the build. Where a problem is not fixed, it can stop the work or refuse to let the stand open. Compliance with the venue's working rules and with occupational health and safety requirements is part of the same control. The sector report points the same way, recommending that operators swap the blanket obligation for an approval or accreditation mechanism based on objective criteria. The practical reading is that when a venue asks for paperwork, it is usually not trying to shut the door. Keep the file ready: the current periodic inspection report for any lifting equipment, the operator's training record, third party liability insurance, the list of crew working on site with their social security notifications, and flame retardancy certificates for the scenery. With those documents in hand, the exclusivity conversation goes very differently.
You signed the standard contract. What is left?
Articles 20 to 25 of the Code of Obligations. Clauses drafted in advance by one side and written for use in many similar contracts count as general terms, and article 20 adds that a note saying each clause was individually discussed and accepted does not, by itself, strip them of that status. Article 21 makes a clause that runs against the other party's interest part of the contract only if the drafter expressly flagged its existence, gave a genuine chance to learn its content, and the other party accepted it; otherwise the clause is deemed unwritten. The second paragraph of the same article treats clauses foreign to the nature of the contract the same way. Article 23 reads an unclear or ambiguous clause against the drafter, article 24 deems unwritten any clause letting the drafter change terms unilaterally, and article 25 forbids terms that, contrary to good faith, worsen the other party's position. The text carves out no exception for merchants. Article 18 of the Commercial Code, however, requires every merchant to act as a prudent businessperson, so signing without reading has a price that lands on you. These provisions help you at the table; they do not guarantee an outcome in court.
Ask for the outside supplier charges item by item, before you sign
Venues do not always build exclusivity as an outright ban. The more common method is to price the outside crew instead, and that is what quietly breaks your quote comparison. Ask for these in writing before signature: the outside supplier or hall access fee, rigging and hanging point charges, the electrical connection fee per kilowatt and distribution board allocation, internet lines, loading, unloading and handling, forklift and crew, storage, the build and strike windows with the overtime tariff, cleaning and waste. Ask whether each figure includes VAT. Get the list signed as an annex, because if it is not attached, the price during event week is set by the venue rather than by you. Then run the maths twice. Put the total for buying from the venue's own team next to the total for bringing your own crew and paying the access charges. Sometimes the gap is small. Sometimes it is big enough to rewrite the entire audio and lighting budget.
How different is an exhibition hall?
The chain gains a link. The hall operator puts the obligation on the organiser, and the organiser passes it to the exhibitor through the participation contract, which is exactly what the sector report documented. A company commissioning a stand ends up bound by rules set by an operator it never speaks to. The scale is not small. According to TOBB's 2025 exhibition statistics, 461 fairs were held in Türkiye that year with 85,508 exhibitors, the net stand area allocated to them reached 3,447,160 square metres, and 190 of those fairs took place in Istanbul. If you are planning a custom stand, run the order properly: read the technical annex of the participation contract first, then design. That annex carries the height limit, whether rigging from the ceiling is allowed, the rules on double decker stands, the floor loading limit, any approved contractor requirement, and the build hours. Starting fabrication before the design is approved risks a stand that never gets through the door.
Five lines to get into the contract
First, scope: the mandatory ancillary services and their prices are attached as an annex and cannot be raised unilaterally before the event date. Second, approval: the documents an outside supplier must provide, the notice period, and the objective criteria used to assess it are written down, and approval cannot be refused without reasons. Third, timing: load-in and load-out hours, the rehearsal window and the overtime tariff are fixed by the hour. Fourth, liability: where the venue's own crew does the installation, the contract says who carries the risk for delay and damage, and sets a handover record procedure. Fifth, technical data: hanging point capacities, available power and the position of the distribution board, the floor loading limit and the load-in door dimensions come as an annex. Tales Event is based in Istanbul and runs audio, lighting, LED screen, staging and scenic production with its own crew for dealer meetings, launches, openings, concept gala nights and graduation ceremonies across Türkiye. Send us the venue contract and its technical specification; we will separate what is genuinely mandatory from what is negotiable and quote both scenarios.
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