Getting Started With Show Guide 2023
Show Guide 2023 is an exhibition floor planning and attendee navigation tool. It lets you digitize booth layouts, generate QR-based wayfinding, and track traffic patterns across convention centers. If you manage trade shows or venue events, it replaces those paper maps and makes it easier for people to find their way around without asking staff a hundred times where booth C42 is. The interface is not exactly pretty, but it gets the job done. You import a venue floorplan as a PNG or PDF, draw your booth zones, assign exhibitors, and publish. Attendees scan a code or open a link and get a turn-by-turn map from wherever they are in the hall to the booth they selected.
Show Guide 2023
Here is the practical part. First thing you need is a venue floorplan that is at least somewhat accurate. I have seen people try to trace over a generic outline and end up with a booth that looks like it is floating three feet above the actual floor. That is a problem because the AR-style navigation gets confused when the user's position doesn't match the layer underneath. Always use the venue's official CAD or high-res map if they provide one. If they don't, get a measured shot on your phone with a known reference point and overlay accordingly. After you import the floorplan, I usually start by placing the structural boundaries first, not the booths. Walls, restrooms, entry points, food zones. Then I drop the booth shapes on top. This order matters because the routing engine uses the structural layers to calculate paths. If you put booths before defining the walkways, you will get routes that cut through walls or force people through vendor-only corridors. Once the layout is set, assign exhibitors by dragging their names into booth polygons. Show Guide 2023 supports bulk import through CSV, so do not type these in one by one unless you only have ten booths. I once had a client who manually entered 247 exhibitors. Took about two hours. CSV upload did the same thing in six minutes and caught three duplicate booth numbers that the manual entry had missed.
The publishing step is straightforward. Generate a QR code, embed it on signage, and include a short URL on any pre-event communications. Attendees open the link and the app detects their location through a combination of Bluetooth beacons and manual pin-drop if the beacons are not yet installed in the venue. One specific issue I ran into recently involved Bluetooth beacon drift in a high-ceiling hall with metal truss structures overhead. The navigation accuracy dropped to about fifteen meters, which meant people would end up walking toward the wrong side of an aisle. The workaround was to disable automatic beacon triangulation in the Show Guide 2023 settings and switch to a manual location pin system where attendees confirm their current spot before receiving directions. It added one extra tap per navigation request, but it eliminated the wrong-way errors entirely. Not ideal, but better than frustrated visitors showing up twenty minutes late. If you want real-time heatmaps of foot traffic, make sure your venue has compatible beacon hardware before you commit to that feature. Show Guide 2023 will let you enable it, but without the hardware in place you just get blank data. I learned that the hard way at a mid-sized electronics expo where half the floor had no beacon coverage. The heatmap showed nothing except the area near the main entrance where three beacons were clustered. Worth knowing before you promise analytics to your stakeholders.
Get the Full Details
Pricing runs around eighty dollars per event for the standard plan, with add-ons for advanced analytics and custom branding. The free trial covers up to five booth layouts and basic QR generation. If you are doing a single show per year, the trial might be enough to vet the tool. If you are managing multiple events or a permanent installation, the annual subscription model is more sensible and drops the per-event fee significantly. One thing the documentation does not emphasize enough: the export feature for offline mode. If your venue has unreliable cellular or Wi-Fi, you can pre-download the venue map and routing data to attendees before they arrive. I recommend forcing this for any show where you know the connectivity will be poor. Convention centers are notoriously bad at handling hundreds of devices on a single network during peak hours. You can download Show Guide 2023 directly from their website or through the App Store and Google Play. The web dashboard works on any modern browser. No special plugins required, though Chrome gives the smoothest experience for the floorplan editor. Firefox is fine too. Safari tends to lag slightly when rendering complex multi-floor layouts, so I avoid it for the editing phase and only use it for quick mobile checks.
Overall it is functional, not flashy. If you need something that integrates with event management platforms like Cvent or Bizzabo, check the integration list first. Show Guide 2023 connects to a few major systems, but not all of them. I wasted a morning trying to sync with a smaller platform that was not on their supported list before finding out the hard way. Just verify compatibility before you start building your workflow around it.
