Guide

Accreditation for a medical or academic congress in Argentina: attendees, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors

By SOMOS DER · October 30, 2026 · 7 min read

To accredit a medical or academic congress, treat each audience as what it is: attendees, speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, press and staff come in through different places and have different permissions. The orderly way is one registration link per audience, a unique QR code per person, a badge that shows the category at a glance and a check-in point only in the rooms where the permission changes or where you need to know who was there. That entry record is also the basis the committee uses to issue its certificates of attendance. If you are an agency or a society from abroad running a congress in Argentina, this is the structure to agree with your local team before registration opens.

Why a scientific congress is not an event with guests

At a corporate event there is a list and a door. At a medical or academic congress there is a programme with parallel rooms, a scientific committee that decides who presents, sponsors who paid for visibility and have stands, and attendees who often need to prove they were there. Each of those audiences asks the door something different: the attendee wants to get in fast, the speaker needs to reach their room and the preparation area, the sponsor has to be able to set up before opening and the committee wants to know how many people went to each session.

It is a format that repeats a lot in Argentina. In an official 2019 note from the national Tourism Secretariat, Argentina appeared in 18th place in the ICCA ranking (the International Congress and Convention Association), with a record 232 international congresses in 2018. Many of them are organised by scientific societies, and almost all share the same problem: several audiences in the same building on the same day.

If your worry is the peak on the first morning, we cover that in how to accredit a congress without queues. Here the focus is different: who is who and what each one can do.

Step 1: one registration link per audience

The most common mistake is a single form with a menu that says "I am: attendee / speaker / sponsor". Someone always picks the wrong option, sometimes by accident and sometimes not. In PASE each attendee type has its own registration link, and the person is placed in the category of the link they used, without choosing it.

• Attendees: the public link, the one on the society's website and in the promotion.
• Speakers: sent by the scientific committee only to those with an accepted presentation.
• Sponsors and exhibitors: sent by the commercial team, one per company, with the number of people each one is entitled to.
• Press and staff: each with their own, as at any event.

Every registrant receives their QR code and a PDF badge by email. If someone mistypes their email, the checker flags it while they register (gmial.com, hotmail.con), and if they still lose it, they can use "Recover my pass". For an international faculty, registration and the attendee email are available in Spanish and in English: share the links with ?lang=en. Reports, on the other hand, come only in Spanish.

Step 2: ask for what you need, and nothing about health as mandatory

At a medical congress it is tempting to ask for everything: specialty, institution, licence number, years of practice. Some of that is useful (specialty for the report, licence number if an activity requires it), some is not. Argentina's Law 25,326 on personal data protection requires data to be accurate, adequate, relevant and not excessive for the purpose, and not to be used for purposes other than those for which it was collected.

There is one point that matters more at these congresses than at others: the same law considers health data sensitive and says nobody can be forced to provide it. If you need to know whether someone requires accessibility support or a special meal, make it an optional field and say what it is used for. The full detail of what to inform and how to ask for consent is in our article on Law 25,326.

Step 3: a badge that shows the category from a distance

In a hall with a thousand people, whoever checks the door to the speakers' room has no time to read surnames. The badge has to show the category in large type, with its own colour or band per type: attendee, speaker, sponsor, exhibitor, press, staff. The QR code is still there, because the real check is done by the scanner, but the visible category organises circulation and avoids arguments.

PASE prints badges in several sizes, and at the accreditation desk you can have speakers' and sponsors' badges printed in advance so they skip the general queue. To choose format and size, see printed vs digital event badges.

Step 4: room control only where it is needed

Not every room needs a scanner. Plenary sessions open to every registrant can stay free. The ones worth controlling are three:

• Workshops with limited places: where space is limited and only those who signed up get in.
• Activities that give credits or a certificate: where you need to know who was there, not just how many.
• Restricted areas: the speakers' preparation room, the exhibitors' set-up area, a sponsor symposium for a defined audience.

In PASE that is the permission matrix: each attendee type is marked with the sectors it can enter, and the scanner in each room answers VALID or NOT AUTHORIZED on the spot. Rooms are set up in re-entry mode, because the doctor who steps out to take a call has to be able to come back without the scanner saying they already went in. The main entrance, on the other hand, is best left as a single entry, and there anti double entry stops two people from getting in with the same QR code.

Two things to keep in mind. The door checks attendee type and sector, not the day or the time: if a pass is only valid for one day of the congress, use one sector per day. And each controlled room is a check-in point, which changes the plan you need (see pricing). A congress with a general entrance, two workshops and the speakers' room already uses four.

Step 5: the certificate of attendance comes from the entry record

PASE does not issue certificates. What it does is record every entry with the time and the check-in point, and deliver the real attendance report by type, by sector and by hour, plus the closing report. That report is the basis the organising committee uses to prepare and sign its certificates, with the format and requirements set by the society or the university.

For that basis to work, decide before the congress what counts as "having attended": is entering the building one day enough, or do people have to go through the room of each session? If the rule is per room, those rooms need a check-in point from the very first minute. If you decide later, there is no way to rebuild it. To read the report with judgement, see the post-event report for the client.

Step 6: sponsors and exhibitors arrive earlier and leave later

The sponsor setting up a stand at 7 cannot depend on general accreditation opening at 8. Give them their own schedule and their own entry point, or at least a separate desk. If the commercial exhibition is large, set-up and teardown are almost an event of their own: we cover that in trade show accreditation. And if an exhibitor adds someone at the last minute who never registered, manual registration at the door solves it without breaking the record.

Six audiences, one QR code per person and a written rule for what counts as attendance. With that, the congress accredits itself.

Frequently asked questions