InfoComm 2026 is a week away.

Which means right now, somewhere in this industry, someone is booking flights, confirming booth details, sending seventeen Slack messages about logistics, and absolutely not thinking about the fact that they are going to walk 40,000 steps across a convention center floor and will have zero places to sit.

That someone might be you.

This is your intervention. Not about your strategy. Not about your messaging. Not about whether you booked media appointments early enough (we can talk about that later). This is about the basics. The things that seem so obvious that nobody thinks to say them out loud until it is day two of the show and someone is limping and dehydrated and cannot find the south hall.

Consider this your packing list, delivered with love.

10. Download the InfoComm App.

You know it exists. You have known it exists since they announced the show. And yet, statistically speaking, a significant portion of people reading this will arrive in Las Vegas, stand in the middle of the convention center, and try to navigate via vibes.

The app has the floor map. It has the exhibitor list. It has the session schedule. It has a networking feature that lets you find and connect with people before you are already standing awkwardly next to them at a booth. It is, by every measure, more useful than whatever mental image you have of the layout based on a show you attended three years ago.

And here is the part people skip: the app is also where your plan lives. Before you land, open it up and build your schedule. Mark the booths that matter to you. Add the sessions you actually want to attend. Block time for meetings you have already confirmed and reach out about the ones you still need to book. Know which people you want to connect with and send the message before you get there. Map the floor so you are not walking the wrong direction for thirty minutes while someone who planned their day is already three meetings ahead of you.

The people who come home from InfoComm saying it was incredible, so many great conversations, so much momentum — those people had a plan. They were not winging it. They just made it look effortless.

Download the app now. Not at the airport. Now. Then use it.

9. Bring a Plaud. (Or Something Like It.)

At this point, most of us have AI notetakers running on every virtual meeting. Fireflies, Otter, whatever your team uses — it joins the call, captures everything, and hands you a transcript and a summary before you have even closed your laptop. It has become so standard that we barely think about it anymore.

And then we walk into an in-person trade show and leave all of that behind, which makes no sense.

Bring a Plaud or a similar AI recorder to InfoComm and use it the same way you use your meeting notetaker at home. Record booth tours. Record the conversations that matter. Record your own thoughts between sessions while everything is still fresh. You will come home with full transcripts, searchable notes, and enough detail to put together thorough recaps for the team members who could not make the trip — the kind of detailed, useful debriefs that actually move things forward instead of the “it was a good show” summary everyone sends on the flight home.

It also makes follow-up sharper. Instead of vague recollections, you have the actual conversation. You know exactly what was said, what was promised, and what the next step was. That is a meaningful advantage when you are competing with everyone else who attended the same booth and sent the same generic follow-up email.

Extend the same discipline you have built for virtual meetings to the in-person ones. This one pays for itself on day one.

8. A Refillable Water Bottle.

Las Vegas is in the desert. The convention center is air-conditioned to a temperature that feels fine until you realize you have not had water since the breakfast buffet. Convention center water costs approximately the same as a modest car payment.

Bring a bottle. Fill it. Drink from it. Repeat.

This is not glamorous advice. It is the advice that will determine whether you are functional at 4 p.m. on Wednesday or whether you are that person sitting on a bench near the food trucks looking like a cautionary tale.

Hydration is a competitive advantage. Take it seriously.

7. Portable Charger. A Good One.

Your phone is your map, your calendar, your networking tool, your note-taking device, your camera, and your lifeline to anyone who needs to find you on a 900,000 square foot show floor. It will be dead by noon if you do not come prepared.

A portable charger is not optional. It is infrastructure. Get one that can charge your phone at least twice. Keep it in your bag at all times. Consider it the difference between being a functional adult at a trade show and being completely unreachable during the three hours someone important was trying to find you.

6. A Light Layer You Can Carry.

The Las Vegas outdoor temperature in June is aggressively, personally hot. The Las Vegas convention center temperature is set to “meat locker” and does not negotiate. You will go from one to the other approximately forty times a day.

A blazer you can roll up. A light jacket. A zip-up that does not take up half your bag. Something. Because the answer to “are you cold?” should not be “I have been cold for 48 hours and I have given up.”

Bonus: it gives you somewhere to put your phone when you need both hands free.

5. Comfortable Shoes. This is Non-Negotiable.

I will not explain why. You know why.

What I will say is this: the shoes you are currently thinking about bringing? The ones that look great but that you have only worn twice? Leave them at home. I am being very serious. Leave them at home.

InfoComm is not a fashion show. It is a marathon that happens to have excellent AV. The person who shows up in the right shoes is the person who is still having productive conversations at 5 p.m. while everyone else has called it. You want to be that person. Wear the comfortable shoes.

4. Business Cards. And Your LinkedIn QR Code.

Every year, without fail, someone important and very cool shows up to InfoComm with no business cards because they figured everyone does digital now.

Some people do digital now. Many people do not. And the moment you meet the exact right person – the editor who covers your space, the integrator who does exactly the kind of work you want to be specified for, the partner you have been trying to get in front of for two years – and you do not have a card, you will feel it. That moment of patting your pockets and finding nothing.

Print the cards. Bring more than you think you need. Keep a stack in every pocket, bag, and jacket.

And for the digital side: save a screenshot of your LinkedIn QR code to your camera roll before you leave home. That way you can pull it up in two seconds without opening the app and fumbling through menus while someone waits. On iPhone, go to your LinkedIn profile, tap the grid icon in the top right corner, and your QR code is right there. Screenshot it by pressing the side button and volume up at the same time. On Android, open LinkedIn, tap your profile photo, select View Profile, tap the QR icon near your name, and screenshot it with the power button and volume down. It saves to your Photos automatically. Done.

Cards for the people who want cards. QR code for the people who want digital. No excuses for leaving a conversation without a connection made.

3. Dinner Reservations. Ideally Made Weeks Ago.

If you do not have dinner reservations already, I have some difficult news for you.

Las Vegas during a major trade show is not a city where you wander out at 7 p.m. and find a table for four at a good restaurant. It is a city where every other person at InfoComm had the same idea before you did, and the waitlist at the places worth going to is already long enough to make you reconsider eating entirely.

Book now. Tonight. Whatever you have to do. Call in a favor, use a reservation app, get on a waitlist, something. A dinner reservation in Las Vegas during show week is not a luxury. It is a business asset. Some of the best conversations of the whole show happen across a table at the end of the day, away from the noise and the floor. Do not let that opportunity go to the person who planned ahead.

2. A One-Sentence Answer to “So What Do You Do?”

This is not a physical item. Bring it anyway.

Everyone at InfoComm will ask you this. And most people, even very smart and experienced people in this industry, will answer it badly. They will start with their company name, then their job title, then the thing their company makes, and then they will notice the person they are talking to has started looking for an exit.

Know your one sentence before you land. Not a tagline. Not a pitch deck. One sentence that says who you help, how, and why it matters. Practice it until it sounds like you are not practicing it. It is the most valuable thing you will bring to the floor.

1. Advil. More Than You Think You Need.

Here is the honest version of what InfoComm does to your body.

Your feet will hurt. The show floor is concrete under carpet, which sounds manageable until hour six when your legs have absorbed the cumulative impact of a very long day. Your back will hurt from standing, from leaning over tables to look at gear, from carrying a bag that gets heavier every time someone hands you something.

And then there is everything else. The late dinners that turned into late nights. The open bars at evening events that felt very reasonable in the moment. The hotel room that is either freezing or inexplicably warm, and the sleep that never quite recovers from the travel day.

Advil will not fix any of this. But it will make the difference between being functional at 8 a.m. for day two and doing a quiet personal inventory of every decision you made the night before while staring at the hotel ceiling.

Pack it. Take it preemptively. Be the person who offers it to the colleague who forgot theirs. That person will remember you forever.

Here is the thing about InfoComm. For all the logistics and the sore feet and the early mornings, it is genuinely one of the best weeks of the year. The energy on that floor is unlike anything else in this industry. The conversations are real. The connections matter. The ideas you come home with have a way of shaping the next twelve months in ways you did not see coming when you landed.

Pack smart. Plan ahead. Show up ready. And then let yourself enjoy it, because a week surrounded by the best and brightest in Pro AV, with the whole industry in one place and every door open, is a pretty remarkable thing.

We will be there. Come find us.

See you in Las Vegas.

InfoComm 2026 runs June 13 to 19 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with exhibits on the floor June 17 to 19. If you want to make sure your brand is showing up the right way – media appointments, pre-show strategy, booth messaging, post-show follow-up —that is exactly what TIG does.