How does a completely vacant convention center with bare concrete floors turn into a small city with booths, offices, lighting, slot machines, table games, lounges, and lecture halls in just four days? It’s an amazing process to witness, but it actually takes months of pre-planning to accomplish.
The Indian Gaming Association’s (IGA) great-looking tradeshow floor with more than 300 booths opened on Wednesday morning last week. But just four days earlier, the entire space in the San Diego Convention Center was barren. Shipping crates, slot machines, and the like began arriving early the week before and were stored in an adjacent warehouse until Saturday morning.
Clarion Gaming, which organizes the IGA event, began their planning quite a bit earlier. Clarion’s Brian Sullivan said, “We are already working on next year’s event (2027) planned for Las Vegas.” He said the whole process begins with vendors bidding on their spaces. The previous year’s largest booths and those with the longest attendance records get to choose first. Predictably, that has been IGT for almost a decade or more. Of course, newer vendors renting the largest spaces come next, down to first-timers with smaller spaces generally located on the outer fringes of the tradeshow floor.
The first order of business is a crew with masking tape, marking the soon-to-be aisles and booth spaces. Then come the electricians to provide power to the spaces. The work then turns chaotic, as an fleet of forklifts starts moving shipping containers in and out. Aisles virtually disappear as the boxes accumulate seemingly everywhere — except for a few corridors specifically marked as “Keep Clear, No Crates.”
While all this is happening, the self-propelled high-lift rigs work to hang signs, lights, location indicators, and banners. And there’s no shortage of old-school ladders with staff straddling the top steps to get everything hung or bolted into place.
Like booth-space selection, the big veteran vendors get to hit the floor first, while the smaller spaces have to wait for their electricity, signs, and carpet.
Carpeting is a major operation itself. The pads and final mats go down right after the electricians finish, but the aisles remain bare concrete until the early-morning hours before the show opens. That’s a good thing, because the forklift traffic would destroy them.
Clarion organizes this whole event, but GES (Greyhound Exposition Services) does the actual work, bringing in an army of drivers, security, electricians, carpenters, and the like to make the whole thing happen. GES does the setup and tear down on almost everything from large shows (like the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) and medium events like the annual G2E gaming show in the fall to smaller local tradeshows throughout the country and around the world.
Despite all the planning, there are always last-minute changes. Several of the aisle-marking signs this year had to be moved when a vendor’s new booth was blocking the planned location. Or some shipping containers are lost in transit and the like. Once GES does all the heavy lifting, another new battalion of vendor technicians arrives to fire up the slot machines, make sure the internet connections are working, unpack the boxes of brochures, and make sure the candy dishes are well stocked.
The entire process is fascinating to watch, but somewhat intimidating, since forklifts are roaming wild and free, objects can be hanging precariously before being permanently anchored, and trip hazards are everywhere. Of course, the majority of attendees never see any of this. To them, it’s a beautiful landscape of dazzling slot machines, colorful padded carpets, loud music, and demonstrations.
Once the show closes, all the attendees leave and the ballet begins once again — this time in reverse.
