Bill - if the guy is going to a trade show, the image he wants to project is paramount. You will remember from your daze in various fields the selling image is a large factor in the brand and price/value perception of the product. Those tops probably don't actually have laminate on them at the price, even as a commodity. More likely melamine printed on the wood with a rubber T molding popped in the edge. Used wrong, easy to connote "cheap"
They are factory made to optimized processes by the millions of SQ FT all year long, world-wide use. We sit down at them all the time.
Better restaurants have bitchin' elegant surfaces, SubWay - still not bad. They are flat, rugged, not at all bad looking, and stand up well to chronic bumping and cleaning.
If I wanted an exotic laminate, I'd contact-cement it right over top of one of these so I didn't have to do what is already done - glue to the MDF nor worry about flatness. They come "reversible" as an excuse to put the melamine on BOTH sides for balance, do not warp easily.
Trade show? Yeah.. .done a few. Eventually had a staffer who managed ours for me - full-time job, year-round. Much of each year had to do with getting the specialists who build modular mobile displays to craft our latest one. Trade show displays that are practical for transport, set-up, tear-down IN that challenging environment are their rice-bowl. The best among them know things others do not, and are VERY good at what they do as to pragmatic displays that JFW, no matter how Buck-Rogers exotic they appear once set-up.
What is ON TOP OF that surface is what had best grab and hold the attention.
The deck under it should be unremarked. Job One for it is to NOT
distract.
It should only be an eye-popper if you are selling... ability to provide custom laminates! ELSE.. "invisible".
Most places? It is done with locally rented foldables and textile draping anyway. Easier to not have to ship as much, nor have as much at risk of local damage.
Hope the OP is already aware of how restrictive these venues are as to whom is or is not allowed to deliver, unload delivery vehicles, move stuff once inside, load-out on departure, strict time limits, electric power.. yadda, yadda, 'coz if not, it can be a sore frustrating education.
I'd probably be putting far more ingenuity and craftsmanship into a bespoke protective shipping container that could double as a brochure store or a riser once the "gadget" it had protected was out and on display. You daren't risk it going walkabout whilst in a secondary storage area. BTDTGTTS on that as well.
Without that protection, all too easy to have a borderline disaster.
I had built some meself, had my first one built by a pro, 1970 IEEE Eastcon instead, outdrew IBM - one position over - in attendance [1], damaged nothing, never looked back at DIY.
Too much at stake. "Find the Experts!"
[1] Well we DID have the world's first-ever real-time digitized color graphics display of satellite information. OSO-G - a UV spectrophotometer mapping sunspot activity, NASA Greenbelt our client, with digitally-assigned human-visible color code conversion from the UV intensity.
More of an eye-catcher than IBM's 80 thousand character per second CRT-type ink-particle printer the eye couldn't keep up with. All IBM had for a "draw" was a bigger booth and the odd noise as a few feet tall stack of paper vanished from one pile and ended up on the other!