Nith Sisombath

The Best Nightclub & Bar in Vegas
March 15, 2008

Where can you find a Playboy bus, Red Bull dance floor, Monster Energy dunk tank and more free alcohol then you can possibly drink? At the Nightclub & Bar Beverage Retailer Convention and Trade Show in Las Vegas of course!

This show was incredible and definitely lived up to its reputation. The attitude and vibe from this show was intoxicating. If you exhibit at this show you wouldn’t know that our economy was in a slump because exhibitors and attendees were doing business like it was easy. Exhibitors and attendees were mixing drinks and mixing business with pleasure which seems to be how business is done in the nightclub and bar industry. Sure there was room for improvement, and show management is all for making the show more manageable as long as it doesn’t take away from the vibe and the attitude, they are all for it. 

For example, the first day of the show working as a floor manager I had to approach several exhibitors that were blasting their music too loud. When I say too loud I mean that you couldn’t hear yourself think if you were in a booth near them. It was so loud no exhibitors could conduct business. Show management went around to all the noisy exhibitors with decibel meters and showed them where they had to be or threatened to pull their power for a length of time. As long as they didn’t blast their music too loud and their neighbors didn’t complain about not being able to conduct business in their booths we let them party like they wanted. 

The Nightclub & Bar Beverage Retailer Convention and Trade Show was definitely the epicenter of “Hospitality Week” in Las Vegas.  The farther you traveled from the Nightclub & Bar section of the show the quieter it got. The International Restaurant Show and the Coffee & Tea Expo which were very close to the Nightclub & Bar section received a much welcomed flow of attendees. The Hotelworld section of the show which was the farthest from the Nightclub & Bar section was much quieter then the rest but I’m sure they will be located a bit closer to the action next year and receive their share of the tremendous traffic at the show.

The first day of the show the aisles were jammed packed with traffic and there was still a lot of traffic the last day of the show. Normally traffic dies down towards the end of any show and exhibitors start to pack up early but not in this show. Attendees wanted to stay around and mingle with exhibitors as long as they could and even volunteered to help exhibitors break down, which of course is not allowed. I have never been to a tradeshow where I had to kick people off the floor the last day of the show. That is usually reserved for consumer shows where everyone can’t wait to get in and do not want to leave whether it is a car show, a boat show or a motorcycle show. I felt that way here but this was a tradeshow and tradeshows are supposed to be business oriented where people get down to business right? Well, apparently this is how the nightclub and bar people do business and there definitely was a lot of business being done because every exhibitor had a smile on their face even the ones that were complaining during move-in. There were smiles and cheers all around the show floor. 

I learned lots of things working this show but the most important thing I felt I learned was this: “If your tradeshow has a great “vibe” make sure whatever you do does not counter act it.”

Posted by Nith Sisombath on March 15, 2008 | Comments (0)