How to choose a city and venue for your conference

The venue is the biggest line in most conference budgets and the hardest to change once signed. The city decides who can afford to come. Choose the city first, then the venue, and put numbers against both before you fall for a lobby.

This guide works for any city. It covers shortlist criteria, hotel block and catering arithmetic, a site-visit checklist, RFP questions, and a weighted table for the final decision. Every worked example uses invented numbers and says so.

Start with where your attendees travel from

Pull the cities or postal codes from your last two years of registrations, or from your mailing list if you have no history. Group them by region. A conference where most attendees come from one metro area belongs in or near it. One with attendees spread across a country belongs near a hub airport.

Count the cost of travel to attendees, not just to you. A cheap venue in a city with one flight a day moves the cost onto attendees, who then decide not to come. Look up a typical fare and door-to-door time from your top five origin cities to each candidate. Put the median in your comparison table.

Shortlist cities before you look at venues

• Flight access. Nonstop flights from your top origin cities, airport-to-downtown time, and the last departure on the final day. An event that ends at 4 p.m. in a city whose last flight leaves at 5 p.m. costs every attendee an extra night.
• Hotel supply. Rooms within a ten-minute walk of the candidate venues, and whether your dates fall in high season.
• Dates against local events. Check the convention bureau calendar. A citywide trade show or a marathon the same week raises hotel rates and fills restaurants. A quiet week gives you room to negotiate.
• Labor and AV rules. Some venues require in-house or union crews for loading, rigging, electrical, and audio-visual work, with minimum call times and overtime rules. It changes the AV budget by enough to matter. Get the rules in writing from the venue.
• Walkability. Attendees judge a conference by the evenings as much as the sessions. Walk from the headquarters hotel to the venue and on to the nearest restaurants, and time it. Ten minutes is fine. Twenty-five minutes in a suit in August is not. If it fails, budget for shuttles and expect fewer hallway conversations.
• Local costs. A typical hotel rate, a typical dinner, and the tax on both. These land on attendees and on your catering bill.

Score three or four cities on these before requesting a single venue proposal.

Hotel block arithmetic, with an illustrative example

Illustrative example with invented inputs. A hotel block is a promise in both directions. You promise to fill rooms, and the hotel promises a rate. If you do not fill them, an attrition clause makes you pay for a share of the empty ones.

• Expected attendance: 400.
• Share who need a room: 60%, from the travel-origin analysis above. That is 240 people, and with no room sharing, 240 rooms on the peak night.
• Arrival pattern: 150 rooms the night before day one, 240 on the night between the two days, 60 on the final night.
• Block at 80% of the expected peak, leaving room for people who book elsewhere: 240 × 0.8 = 192. Round down to 190 rooms.

Now read the attrition clause. Suppose it says you owe for 80% of the blocked rooms. 190 × 0.8 = 152 rooms must be picked up on the peak night, or you pay for the shortfall. If only 140 are picked up, you owe for 12 rooms. At an invented rate of $189 a night, that is 12 × $189 = $2,268 for one night, plus tax. Run the same sum for each night.

Ask for attrition to be measured across the whole block rather than night by night, and for a cut-off date after which unsold rooms go back to the hotel with no penalty. Whether you get either depends on how much the hotel wants your dates, which is why the convention calendar matters.

Catering minimums and the food and beverage budget

Illustrative example with invented inputs. Venues that rent meeting space cheaply make it back on food and beverage, and the contract will carry an F&B minimum. Check whether you will clear it.

• Continental breakfast at $28 per person, lunch at $55, and two coffee breaks at $14 each. That is $111 per person per day.
• Two days: $222 per person. For 400 people: $88,800 before service charge and tax.
• Service charge at 24% (invented): $88,800 × 1.24 = $110,112.
• Tax at 8% (invented): $110,112 × 1.08 = $118,921, rounded to the dollar.

Now suppose the contract carries a $75,000 F&B minimum and you drop breakfast to save money. Lunch and two breaks come to $83 per person per day, $166 for two days, and $66,400 for 400 people. Minimums are usually measured before service charge and tax, so you are now $8,600 short, and you owe that anyway. Cutting the menu saved nothing. Ask how the minimum is measured before you touch the menu. Per-person prices vary widely by city and venue; the point is the shape of the sum.

The site visit checklist

1. Arrive the way an attendee would, from the airport, by the transport they will use.
2. Count the real capacity of each room in your setup, not the venue's maximum.
3. Check sightlines to the screens from the back row and the side seats.
4. Run a speed test on your phone in the plenary and in the smallest breakout.
5. Stand in one breakout while the adjacent one is in use. Sound bleed is the complaint you cannot fix on the day.
6. Walk the load-in route: dock, freight elevator, corridor widths, and permitted hours.
7. Stand where registration will be and picture 300 people arriving in the same 20 minutes. Find where the queue goes.
8. Check step-free routes between every room, accessible toilets, and hearing loop or captioning options.
9. Meet the person who will run your event on the day, not only the salesperson.

Questions to put in the venue RFP

• Room rental for each space and what it includes: furniture, staging, basic AV, and setup changes between sessions.
• The F&B minimum, how it is measured, and the service charge and tax rates on top.
• Whether AV is exclusive to an in-house supplier, and if not, the fee for bringing your own.
• Labor rules: union requirements, minimum call times, and overtime triggers.
• Internet: the cost of dedicated bandwidth and the concurrent-device limit.
• Hotel block: rate, attrition percentage and how it is measured, cut-off date, and complimentary rooms per rooms picked up.
• Cancellation and force majeure terms, with the dates at which each penalty steps up.
• Other events in the building on your dates, and any restrictions they create.
• Insurance and security requirements, the payment schedule, and the name of your on-site contact.

Send the same RFP to every finalist so the answers line up. A venue that answers half the questions is telling you how it will behave in the contract.

Compare two finalists with a weighted table

Once you have two finalists, stop arguing in the abstract. Give each criterion a weight, with the weights adding up to 100. Score each city from 1 to 5, multiply, and add. The weights below are invented for a fictional 400-person conference where most attendees fly in.

Scroll sideways to see all columns.

City B wins by ten points out of a possible 500. That margin is smaller than a one-point score change on any criterion weighted 10 or more, so the decision hinges on the weights, not the scores. If your team believes the evenings matter more than travel, raise walkability and see whether the result flips. A weighted table does not make the decision. It makes the disagreement specific.

Before you sign, put the finalist's contract terms next to your hotel block and F&B arithmetic and confirm the numbers still hold. If you run the agenda, check-in, and room locations in an event app, see how we handle in-person events and upload the venue's floor plan. For the app side of the budget, see how much a conference app costs.