August Product Updates: Bigger Floor Plans, Smarter Check-In & Offline Lead Capture

Event day has a way of exposing the gaps.

The floor plan you published three weeks ago no longer matches the hall, because four booths have changed hands since. A rep at your busiest booth loses a lead because the WiFi drops at that exact moment. Someone checks in, collects a badge, then stands in the lobby waiting for a person in a branded shirt to tell them what happens next.

None of these are big failures. They’re small ones, repeated all day, and together they turn your team into a patching operation instead of an events team.

August’s updates tackle this. Here’s what’s new at vFairs:

Design Your Floor Plan, Sell It, and Manage It Live

You’ve been building interactive floor plans with vFairs for a while now. This month’s rebuild is about handling bigger, more complex venues, and making the whole thing a lot faster to set up.

Until now, a show running across several halls, each with its own floors, had to be flattened onto one canvas, and a few hundred booths meant configuring them one at a time. 

You can now create halls, and within each hall, multiple floors, each edited and published on its own. So the plan mirrors how your venue is actually organized, and a finished hall can go live while you’re still laying out the next.

The plan is drawn to real measurements, in feet or meters on a grid you configure, so a booth’s size on screen matches its size on the floor. Booths snap into alignment as you drag them, and you can select multiple booths and apply the same change at once instead of clicking into each one. This is useful when you’re pricing a tier of premium corners or a whole sponsor row.

Booths are connected to the rest of your event, too. Logos pull from the exhibitor portal, and you can assign tickets by booth category or by booth size.

Booth status stays live — available, on hold while someone’s mid-checkout, then booked — so the plan keeps itself accurate while you sell. Your team can see what’s left without asking anyone.

And attendees get built-in wayfinding in the mobile app, with routes, real distance, and ETA. That’s the part your exhibitors notice, because it’s how they get found.

Keep Capturing Leads When the Venue WiFi Drops

Your lead capture app now keeps working when the venue WiFi doesn’t. The moment a rep goes offline, a message appears on screen telling them exactly what still works and what doesn’t, so nobody’s standing at a booth guessing whether their last three scans registered. They keep adding leads manually, or scan a business card, and carry on with the conversation.

When the connection returns, the app prompts them to sync, and everything captured offline lands alongside the rest of the day’s leads. Nothing has to be reconstructed from memory or a stack of cards in a pocket.

The result is that your exhibitors go home with a complete lead list, which is a much better conversation to have at renewal than one about the WiFi.

Give Every Attendee a Next Step at Check-In

Attendees get verified and badged at check-in, but they often don’t know what to do next or where to go. So your staff ends up answering the same question over and over, all morning.

The new personalized check-in experience closes that gap. The moment an attendee checks in or prints a badge, vFairs can trigger a custom pop-up or notification that points that specific person to wherever they should be next. A VIP gets sent to the lounge. A hosted buyer gets sent to their first scheduled meeting. A student gets sent to their session. A general admission attendee gets sent to the opening keynote.

It works the same way across the mobile app and onsite kiosks, so it doesn’t matter whether someone checked in on their phone on the way in or at a counter in the entrance hall. The right instruction reaches them either way.

Two things come out of this. Attendees get a first impression that feels built for them rather than processed, which sets the tone for everything that follows. And your onsite team gets to spend the morning on the problems that actually need a human.

Match the App Home Screen to Your Event

A trade show attendee and a job seeker open the same event app looking for completely different things. One wants to know which products are on the floor. The other wants to know who’s hiring. Until now, both landed on the same general-purpose menu and had to dig.

You can now adapt the mobile app home screen to match your event type.

For a trade show, add product listings pulled from booths you select or from every booth in the hall. Spotlight your premium exhibitors, feature new launches, or open it up across the whole floor. For a career fair, add open jobs instead, pulled from employers you choose or from all of them.

The immediate benefit is for attendees, who land on the thing they came for instead of navigating toward it. The second-order benefit is for exhibitors and employers, who get visibility before anyone reaches their booth — and for organizers, that home screen placement becomes one more thing worth selling.

Create One Notification for the Whole Agenda

If you’ve run a conference day with twenty sessions, you’ve done this: sat down the night before and built twenty separate push notifications, each with its own session name and start time, each scheduled individually. Then someone moved a room, or added a panel, and you did part of it again.

Session Notification Templates replace all of that with one notification.

You write a single push notification using @session_name and @session_time, and vFairs sends it before each session running that day, filling in the right name and time automatically. One template, however many sessions you’re running.

Because the notification reads from your agenda rather than from a list you typed out, last-minute changes are already covered. Move a session, rename it, add one at 9 pm the night before — the reminder that goes out is correct without you touching anything.

Attendees get reminded about the sessions they actually signed up for. You get your evening back.

These updates are live. If you have questions about any of these features or want to see them in action, contact your CSM or reach out to us at [email protected].