Navigating the SHOT Show — How to Plan Your Vegas Visit
NSSF has released a short video to help attendees at the 2012 SHOT Show. This how-to video provides tips for planning meetings as well as mapping and navigating the show floor. It’s wise to plan out your show visit ahead of time. Navigating the maze-like interior of the Venetian Hotel and the multiple levels of the Sands Convention/Expo Center can be challenging to say the least. With 1600+ exhibiting companies, spread out over a 600,000 square-foot area, it’s easy to be overwhelmed, and even easier to waste time retracing your steps. You’ll get the most out of the SHOT show by identifying your priority booth locations, and then creating a walking plan that logically moves from one key booth to the next. The SHOT Show is only 35 days away, so there’s no time like the present to start mapping your show.
Sands Expo Center a Maze-Like Disappointment
What’s wrong with the Sands Expo Center? You name it. The “host” hotel is the Venetian, which is way too expensive for most attendees, not to mention a nightmare to navigate. General “front door” access is poor and there is no on-site parking at all (you have to park at adjacent hotels on the strip). The lower levels are dungeon-like with poor lighting and bad acoustics. The conference rooms are hard to find and most are either too big or too small. The Sands Center has multiple, odd-shaped levels which lack logical ingress/egress points. Floorplans are inconsistent from level to level, and bathrooms are hard to locate. Some popular sections, such as the tactical/police displays, are exiled to upper halls that are hard to reach from the main entrance. Worst of all, to get into the show, most visitors must walk a quarter-mile through the dark, noisy, maze-like interior of the Venetian hotel. It is very easy to get lost in that nightmare of a hotel. On a 1:10 scale, we give the Sands Expo Center a “3″ and that’s only because it’s (barely) big enough and the main hall is bright, with high ceilings (albeit with a leaky roof).
