A Practical Guide to Exhibiting at INTERGEO 2026
INTERGEO 2026 runs from Tuesday 15 to Thursday 17 September 2026 at Messe München, using halls B5, B6, C5 and C6, with doors open from 09:00 to 18:00 on all three days. It is organised by HINTE Expo & Conference GmbH of Karlsruhe together with DVW, the German society for geodesy, geoinformation and land management, and it is a trade-visitor event rather than a public one.
The organiser's own headline figures — more than 530 exhibitors, over 18,500 visitors and 119 countries represented — carry from the most recent edition and describe INTERGEO alone. There is no co-located second fair here and no alliance total to disentangle, which makes the numbers unusually easy to plan against. A three-day conference programme runs alongside the exhibition, with the Main Stage and the Application Dome positioned on the expo floor itself rather than in a separate congress wing, so speaking slots and stand traffic interact more directly than they do at most fairs.
The Fair Moves City Every Year — Plan For It
INTERGEO is annual, but it is not annual in one place. Recent editions have been held in Hannover, Essen, Berlin, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, and 2026 is Munich. This is deliberate on the organiser's part and it works well for visitors, who get the fair on their doorstep every few years. For an exhibitor it creates a specific planning problem that no other major German fair in this calendar has.
Nothing about the venue carries over. Hall numbers on the 2025 floor plan describe a different building. Hall heights, rigging rules, floor loading limits, freight access routes, build-up windows and the appointed contractors are all venue-specific, and they change each time the fair moves. A stand designed tightly around the last venue may be neither legal nor installable at the next one. The practical response is to design for the widest common envelope rather than for one hall — a self-supporting structure that does not depend on rigging, a height that clears the tightest likely hall, and a footprint that can be re-proportioned. That is exactly the pattern a reusable system frame is built for, and it is why a rotating fair rewards modular thinking more than a fair with a permanent home does.
The Calendar Slot Swings Too
The rotation drags the dates with it, because the fair has to fit the availability of whichever venue is hosting. The 2025 edition ran 7–9 October in Frankfurt. The 2026 edition runs 15–17 September in Munich — roughly three weeks earlier in the year.
Organiser and venue deadlines are anchored to the show dates rather than to a fixed calendar month, so all of them move with the fair: space application, technical drawing submission, rigging and services orders, freight slot booking and, for any two-storey build, structural approval. An exhibitor working from a schedule drawn up after the Frankfurt edition will be about three weeks late on every one of them. Work backwards from the confirmed 2026 dates and re-check the deadline list against the organiser's own exhibitor pages rather than against last year's internal plan.
What a Geospatial Demonstration Actually Needs
The physics of this show are unusual and they hit the floor plan before they hit the budget. Three constraints come up on almost every brief. First, satellites: a steel-framed hall blocks GNSS almost completely, so a live rover demonstration inside the hall is not going to work. The realistic options are recorded or simulated data played through the real field controller, scheduled demonstrations outside the hall, or an approved GNSS repeater — which is a regulated installation requiring organiser and venue clearance well in advance, not something arranged during build-up.
Second, sightlines: laser scanners, total stations and imaging sensors need distance to demonstrate anything meaningful, often ten metres or more. On a small stand that only exists if the layout is designed for it, usually as a diagonal lane with the target end deliberately kept empty. It competes directly with enclosed meeting space, and on 24 m² you cannot have both at full size. Third, light: strong directional stand lighting and reflective white surfaces interfere with optical sensors and with the screens showing their output. Controlled, indirect lighting with a darker surface at the target end works far better than the bright uniform wash most stands default to.
Drones, Enclosures and the Permission Question
Unmanned systems have been a significant part of INTERGEO for years, with recent editions running a dedicated unmanned-systems programme curated alongside DVW, DGPF and UAV DACH. Exhibitors reasonably want to show an airframe doing something rather than sitting on a table. Indoor flight, though, is not the exhibitor's decision to make: it requires organiser and venue clearance, and where it is permitted it means a fully enclosed netted volume with its own headroom, anchor points and dedicated floor area — which on a stand under about 40 m² consumes the stand.
What works well in practice is more modest and easier to approve. A static airframe on a raised rig at eye level, lit properly, with the payload visible and a screen beside it running real captured data, communicates more to a technical buyer than a two-metre hover ever does. Tethered demonstration inside a small controlled volume is a middle path where the venue allows it. If flight genuinely matters to your proposition, raise it in the first conversation rather than after the concept is approved, because the answer changes the floor plan, the height, the rigging and the budget all at once.
Who Is Actually Walking Past Your Stand
INTERGEO's visitor profile is not the same as a purely commercial technology fair. Surveying practices and engineering consultancies are there in force, but so are state survey offices, cadastral and land registry authorities, municipal planning and infrastructure departments, and utility network operators. Trade visitors only, and a high proportion of them are technical specialists rather than procurement generalists.
That changes what a stand needs to do. Public-sector conversations tend to involve two or three people at once, run long, and end in a tender or framework process rather than an order. Somewhere to sit down semi-privately is worth more per square metre here than an extra metre of demonstration frontage — a stand that is all open display with nowhere to have a twenty-minute conversation loses the discussion at the moment it becomes valuable. It also means the graphics should carry fewer marketing claims and more concrete specification, because the person reading them can evaluate it.
Building in Frankfurt, Showing in Munich
Our workshop is in Frankfurt and Messe München is roughly 390 kilometres away by road — a domestic freight run of about four hours with no border, no customs file and nothing on the critical path that a customs officer controls. We build and dry-assemble the complete structure on our own floor, photograph it standing for your approval, then dismantle it, load it and drive it south. Our own crew installs it in the hall and takes it down again afterwards.
Because the fair moves, storage between editions matters more here than usual. We keep the reusable structure in our Frankfurt warehouse, which means the following edition costs a graphics refresh, any changes required by the new venue's technical guidelines, and the freight leg to wherever the fair has gone — rather than a rebuild from nothing. Over three or four editions in three or four different cities, that is a substantial difference, and it is the strongest practical argument for a system-based stand at this particular fair.
Because INTERGEO moves city every year, a stand that can be dismantled, stored and re-erected in a different hall is worth more here than almost anywhere else — the structure stays in our Frankfurt warehouse between editions and the next one costs graphics and freight rather than a rebuild. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern.
