What convention center ops teams actually deal with
Not theory. Three things we hear in every conversation with a centre's operations lead.
The booth grid changes weekly
Tuesday morning it's a healthcare expo with 800 booths. Thursday it's a film festival with stages, not booths. Friday is teardown for a private wedding on Saturday. The venue is the same; the contents aren't.
Concrete walls eat cell signal
Most large halls are concrete bunkers. Cell coverage indoors is patchy, and event Wi-Fi saturates inside an hour of doors open. Anything that needs a fresh fetch to draw a route is dead by 10am.
Front-of-house gets every "where's…?"
Volunteers, ushers and information desks absorb the lookup load. Most of their day is spent answering wayfinding questions, not the substantive ones organisers actually need them on.
What OuterMap does for the venue
Honest list — only what's actually in the product.
- One venue, many event skins.Map the halls, entrances, catering, restrooms and accessible routes once. Each event running in the venue gets its own branded app — colours, logo, name — on the same map foundation.
- AI extraction from your floor plan.Drop in your venue floor plan; AI returns paths, halls, entrances, restrooms, dining and zones as an editable draft.
- Booth and exhibitor lookup.Bulk-import a booth list (CSV) per event. Attendees search by exhibitor name, booth number or category. Routing draws the path from the nearest entrance.
- Session schedule per event.Push sessions, speakers and room assignments via the admin or the public API on Enterprise. Mid-event changes (room shift, time change) propagate to attendee apps on next sync.
- Offline by default.Map and exhibitor data cache on first open. Search, routing and POI lookups keep working when Wi-Fi saturates.
- Accessibility filtering.Wheelchair-accessible routes, lifts, accessible parking, step-free entrances and quiet/sensory zones as a filter.
- Multi-language content.POI names and descriptions per language. The app auto-selects from the attendee's device.
- QR-code entry.Same map at a web URL — print a QR on tickets, lanyards or signage and walk-up attendees access the map without installing anything.
What it doesn't do (so you can ask the right questions of other vendors too)
Worth being upfront. We do venue navigation; we don't replace these systems.
Lead retrieval & badge scanning
OuterMap doesn't replace your event-platform lead retrieval (Cvent, Bizzabo, RX). It can deep-link to a booth detail page in your platform, but it isn't itself a lead capture system.
Live wait times by default
If your event pushes wait times or queue states via the OuterMap admin or API, attendees see them. But OuterMap doesn't auto-detect queues — that's a separate data feed.
Indoor positioning hardware
No iBeacons, UWB or Bluetooth anchors. Attendees orient against the map and search by name. For most convention floors, that's enough; if you need precise blue-dot positioning, we partner with positioning vendors via API on Enterprise.
Common questions from convention center teams
Can the same venue host different branded apps for different events?
Yes. The venue floor plan only needs to be mapped once. After that, each event running in the venue can carry its own branding, colours, logo and content — exhibitors, sessions, signage. Switching from one event's app to the next on the same dates is a content swap, not a rebuild.
How do attendees find specific booths?
Attendees search by exhibitor name, booth number or category. The app draws a route from the nearest entrance with walking time. Bulk-import the booth grid from CSV at setup; the AI extraction step handles the underlying hall layout from your floor plan automatically.
Will the app keep working when the convention-center Wi-Fi is saturated?
Yes. Attendees download the map and exhibitor data on first open. After that, search, routing and POI lookups work fully offline — important because convention center Wi-Fi tends to saturate at peak entry and concrete halls block cell signal.
Can we change the schedule or booth list mid-event?
Yes. Push changes from the admin dashboard and attendee apps reflect them on next open. A session moves room, a vendor pulls out, a keynote shifts time — the visible app updates without an App Store resubmission.
Does it integrate with our event registration platform?
Not as a direct vendor integration, but the Enterprise plan exposes a public API and supports SSO. Most operators integrate by syncing exhibitor and schedule data on a timer or via webhook from their event platform. We're happy to help scope an integration during onboarding.
Send your floor plan. We'll show you the foundation.
Free to start. Once the venue is mapped, every event you host can have its own branded app sitting on top of it.
Book a venue demo