Key Considerations for Design & Construction Week

The numbers on the Orlando-to-Las Vegas move have gotten plenty of attention — hanging signs, electrical overtime, material handling, internet. Budget people love a spreadsheet, and the 2025 Annual Survey of Exhibition Rates gave them plenty to work with. But anyone who has spent real time exhibiting at Design & Construction Week knows that the financial analysis, useful as it is, tells maybe half the story. The other half is operational, strategic, and in a few cases psychological — and it tends to surface during move-in rather than during budget season, which is the worst possible time.

Here are eight things worth thinking through before February 2, 2027, arrives and Design & Construction Week’s new home becomes your problem to solve in real time.

Where Your Booth Sits Is Now a Strategic Decision

The Orange County Convention Center is, at its core, two buildings connected by a pedestrian bridge. Traffic flowed in relatively predictable patterns, and a decent booth in a decent location could hold its own through sheer foot traffic alone. The Las Vegas Convention Center doesn't work that way. The campus spans multiple halls across a footprint large enough that NAHB describes the IBS floor alone as “the size of over 40 football fields.” IBS organizes exhibitors into six product segments; KBIS organizes by category across adjacent halls. A booth in the wrong segment relative to where your target attendees spend their time will underperform, regardless of how well it's designed or staffed. In Orlando, location mattered. In Las Vegas, location is a primary driver of KPIs — and it needs to be treated accordingly during the space-selection process, not treated as an afterthought once the contract is signed.

The Vegas Loop is a Traffic Variable

The Boring Company built a tunnel system underneath the LVCC campus that moves attendees between halls in under two minutes via Tesla vehicles for free during show hours. For attendees navigating a campus that would otherwise require a 30-minute walk from end to end, it's a genuine quality-of-life improvement. For exhibitors, it introduces a traffic dynamic that didn't exist at the OCCC. When attendees can cover the entire show floor efficiently, they're more likely to actually do it — which is good for booth discovery. It also means your booth's proximity to Loop stations influences foot traffic in ways worth factoring into your space selection conversation. This is a new variable. Exhibitors who've been showing at DCW for years don't have historical intuition about it, which means it's worth asking NAHB and NKBA's exhibit sales teams directly how traffic has moved in prior Las Vegas editions.

The Hotel Waits for No One

IBS 2027 runs February 2–4. CES 2027 runs January 6–9. If you're doing the math, Las Vegas's hotel market absorbs 140,000-plus CES attendees in early January. The proximity of the two shows creates genuine hotel inventory pressure — particularly for the properties closest to the LVCC — and exhibitors who are accustomed to booking rooms 60 to 90 days out for Orlando are going to find that timeline doesn't work as well in Las Vegas. For major Las Vegas shows, the conventional wisdom among experienced trade show professionals is to lock in hotel rooms six to nine months in advance, with official room blocks opening as early as a year out. For an exhibit team of any size, the hotel budget can become a significantly unpleasant surprise if it isn't handled in advance.

Las Vegas Will Test Your Team

Nobody puts this in a planning checklist, but anyone who has managed a booth team in Las Vegas knows it's real. The city is designed, at a fundamental architectural and hospitality level, to keep people engaged, entertained, awake, and spending money. The hotels are casinos. The restaurants are destination experiences. The Strip is a half-mile walk of deliberate sensory overload. All of it is available immediately after the exhibit hall closes each day, and some of your staff will avail themselves of it enthusiastically. A team that is reliably sharp and energetic on day three in Orlando may be running on four hours of sleep and questionable decision-making in Las Vegas. This is not a reason to avoid Las Vegas. It's a reason to be explicit — before the show, not during it — about expectations around rest, alcohol, scheduling, and booth coverage. The best-performing exhibit teams in Las Vegas treat it as a professional event until the hall closes. What happens after that is a personal matter. The distinction has to be made in advance to be effective.

The Southeast Just Got Farther Away

Orlando was drivable for a significant slice of the IBS and KBIS attendee base. Builders, remodelers, and kitchen and bath professionals throughout Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia could reach the Orange County Convention Center without putting a flight on the company card. Las Vegas is a fly-in market for almost everyone east of the Rockies. For the largest production builders and the major kitchen and bath brands, that's a non-issue — they were flying to Orlando anyway. For the regional mid-market players who represent a meaningful portion of both shows' ecosystems, the travel equation has changed. Whether that translates to reduced attendance from specific geographies, or simply rearranges the buyer mix on the show floor, is worth monitoring — particularly if your target customer base skews toward smaller regional operators in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. The attendance data from prior Las Vegas editions of both shows is worth pulling and examining before you finalize your staffing and lead-generation strategies.

The Bar has been Raised

Las Vegas hosts more major trade shows than any other city in the country — CES, SEMA, CONEXPO, NAB Show, and a rotating calendar of events that collectively represent the highest concentration of professional exhibit design anywhere in the world. The result is an audience — attendees, press, and fellow exhibitors — that has been educated over years to expect a level of visual ambition, technology integration, and production quality that reflects the best work in the industry. A booth that performs competently in most markets can look underpowered in Las Vegas simply because the ambient calibration is different. This isn't a call to blow up your exhibit budget chasing spectacle. It is a legitimate reason to look at your current exhibit with clear eyes and ask whether it's working hard enough for the environment it's about to enter. The exhibitors who will make the strongest first impression at DCW's 2027 edition in Vegas are the ones asking that question now, in the planning phase — not in February, after the hall opens and the answer becomes obvious.

Storylink Creative is a strategy-led experiential marketing and exhibit design agency specializing in trade show exhibits, branded environments, and immersive activations. If you're building your Construction & Design Week strategy, we'd love to be part of that discussion.

Contact us to start the conversation.