If you need to get somewhere with an iMac, I think shipping it is probably more likely to get it there intact than checking it as baggage.
One thing I’ve seen vendors at trade shows do is to buy an inexpensive flat panel TV or monitor and have it delivered to the venue. They hook it up to a laptop or small desktop (a mini would work great for this). During the show, they collect business cards and draw a winner who gets the display at the end of the show. The vendor doesn’t have to deal with getting the display to or from the show and they get a bunch of sales leads. The cost of a cheap display these days is peanuts compared to the other expenses involved in attending a trade show.
Interesting point. I go to about a dozen conferences a year and I know that setting up a trade show exhibition is a minor miracle. Some of those booths for big companies are like whole buildings inside of buildings that go up for a few days at a time and go down.
We have a friend who is retired and her PC took a dump and so I recommended she get a Mac. With travels and whatnot, I suggested she get a MacBook or even consider an iPad Pro.
She drove to the Apple store where they convinced her to get an iMac and said she can travel with it, since theApple staff recommend them all the time to older folks. I thought that was odd, but she packs it up every winter and then brings it back every spring, it works for her.
Not to mention the considerable costs of the mandatory use of union personnel to do basic things like plugging things in - there are many simple things an exhibitor isn’t allowed to perform on the show floor.