What a pre-show site visit is for

8 stand types

stand types weighed against hall conditions

Stand types

Design, production, installation

what the visit tells you feeds all three steps

Exhibition stand services

What the plan leaves out

A floor plan is two-dimensional and says nothing about height. The same square metres behave differently under a seven metre ceiling than under beams that start at four. Ventilation ducts and sprinkler lines are usually absent from the drawing altogether, yet sprinkler clearances feed straight into the closed-ceiling decision.

The ambient light level is another thing you only learn on the floor. Some halls have strong overhead lighting against which a stand’s own fittings look weak; others are dim enough that moderate lighting stands out. The same fitting gives two different results in two halls, so the lighting budget is only fixed after the visit.

Columns appear as a thin square; in the hall the base is wider, and there is often a fire cabinet bolted to it. Floor ducts decide where power and water can be picked up, which in turn decides where the kitchen and store can go. Even the direction a duct cover opens can change the platform decision.

The neighbours become real on a visit too. If the company opposite is going up to five metres, your three metre wall disappears. How the number of open sides and the immediate neighbours change the design is covered on the stand types page.

What to measure and photograph

The visit is a survey, not a walk round. Take a tape, a laser measure and a printout of the floor plan; the notes go on the printout.

Write down the plot numbers of the neighbours while you are measuring. Knowing who you sit beside makes it possible to settle the shared wall line and the height relationship before the show. By the time the organiser publishes the exhibitor list you already have it, and the design decisions get made with the neighbours in view.

1. Columns and bases. Width, depth, distance to the stand boundary. Measured with a tape, not estimated.
2. Floor ducts and covers. Where they run, which way the cover opens, whether a platform can sit on top.
3. Hall height and beam soffit. If anything is to be rigged, where the load points sit and how far apart.
4. Door and gangway widths. Whether the largest single element can physically get into the hall.
5. Visitor routes. Which door people come in by and from which side they approach the stand.

Photograph with a tape in shot rather than going wide. One frame with a measure held against the column beats ten lines of notes written up later, and it ends the argument once it reaches the workshop.

If you cannot travel

You do not have to fly to every show. The organiser can supply the hall’s technical plan, column grid dimensions and duct layout in writing. Most venues publish them in the exhibitor portal, so asking is usually enough and the answer comes back within days.

Asking the organiser for photographs or video helps as well. Many venues can share images of the empty hall; where they cannot, pictures from an earlier show in the same hall are usually online. Those images give no dimensions, but they do tell you how dense the columns are and what the roof structure looks like.

The second route is talking to a crew that has already worked the hall. For firms that return to the same venue several times a year, the hall notes sit in a file: which door is narrow, which hall has the long forklift queue, when the power comes on, which floors are busy with ducts. Those notes do not replace a visit, but they cut the number of surprises.

The third is keeping the first half day of the build as a buffer. Without a visit the odds of a surprise go up, and leaving room in the schedule costs less than making up time on the night.

When should the visit happen?

Before the concept is signed off. A visit made after the design is fixed finds the problem but arrives too late to solve it cheaply.

Is it needed on a return visit to the same hall?

Not if the hall is unchanged, but yes if your position has moved. Two ends of the same hall can offer completely different conditions.