Which Badge Actually Gets You In?

This is the badge issued by the World Economic Forum. It is what gets someone inside the Kongresszentrum and into the official programme.

It is issued only by the Forum, to people connected to its member organisations, partners, invited guests and accredited media. There is no public application to buy one.

Anyone offering to sell you one is not able to deliver it. Questions about accreditation go to the Forum directly.

Separately, companies and organisations rent buildings along the Promenade for the week and run their own programmes inside them.

Those hosts issue their own passes or guest lists. A pass to one venue means nothing at the next door along, and none of them gets you into the Congress Centre.

A busy Davos week usually means moving between these venues, not sitting in official sessions.

A few hotels sit inside a police-controlled security zone. To be dropped off nearby or move through that zone without Annual Meeting accreditation, you register a Secure Hotel Badge through the Forum's official hotel-badge portal, and a car sticker through its separate vehicle portal if you're driving.

It's run by the Cantonal Police of Graubünden, not by any private company. Names, passport details and vehicle details are filed against a hard deadline in December — miss it and there's no late option.

This is real paperwork with a real cost and a real deadline, and it's the one part of "access" we can actually help a group get through — see Bringing a delegation. We file it through the same official portals everyone else uses; we don't issue, sell or shortcut anything.

A real part of the week is simply open. Talks, exhibitions, breakfasts and evening events that anyone in town can walk into, sometimes after registering online.

Being in Davos that week without accreditation is common and entirely normal. Plenty of useful work happens on the street and in cafés.

What you need for that is a place to stay and the time to walk between things.