The Hotel Strategy for CES 2026: Rooms, room blocks, and keeping corporate teams together
CES 2026 runs January 6 to 9 in Las Vegas, and the show footprint is spread across multiple campuses and venues. CES groups locations into three main campuses, including the LVCC Campus and the Venetian Campus, which is a big reason teams end up scattered if they book late or book individually without a plan.
That scattering has a real cost in business travel terms: missed internal syncs, late arrivals to customer meetings, duplicated rides, and managers spending their day rerouting people instead of doing CES work. During CES week, hotel availability tightens as January approaches, and CES notes that rates rise and some hotels sell out quickly. View hotels within a mile radius of CES 2026.
Below is a practical, conference-week hotel strategy built for CES, but it applies to any “citywide” style event.
Why teams get scattered during CES week
CES is not a single-building conference. Even if most of your agenda is anchored at the Las Vegas Convention Center, CES describes the LVCC as its largest venue with multiple distinct halls, and the event map tools are designed to help attendees plan across venues.
On the ground, “close” can still mean a lot of walking. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority notes that the typical walk between the LVCC West Hall and the existing North and Central Hall can take up to 25 minutes, while the LVCC Loop can move that trip in about 2 minutes.
When half the team is near one campus and half is near another, the travel time becomes the default tax on every meeting.
Step 1: Pick a single anchor campus, then optimize around it
Start by choosing one campus as your anchor based on where the majority of your time will be spent.
- If most meetings, sessions, and expo time are LVCC-heavy, anchor on the LVCC Campus.
- If your agenda is mostly suites, private demos, and meetings around the Venetian area, anchor on the Venetian Campus.
- If your team is focused on the third campus CES lists, anchor there and treat everything else as a commute day.
Once you have an anchor, your hotel goal is simple: keep most travelers within a predictable commute to that campus, ideally walkable or one straightforward transit option.
Step 2: Decide if you should do a room block, even for a small team
A small block often makes sense at CES when any of the following are true:
- You have 8 or more rooms, or you expect adds as meetings get scheduled.
- You have executives or customer-facing roles where late arrivals are expensive.
- Your team needs a daily internal cadence (standup, pipeline review, product briefing).
- You have mixed arrival times and want a single place to route people.
CES makes it clear that rooms can sell out and rates rise as the event approaches, which is exactly when last-minute scatter bookings happen. A small block is mainly a control tool, not a discount tool.
Step 3: How many extra rooms should you pad for late adds?
Padding is about protecting your team from the last-week scramble. A simple approach that works well during conference weeks:
- Base rooms: 1 per traveler (or per planned single occupancy)
- Pad: add 10% to 15% as flex
- A quick rule of thumb: 1 extra room for every 8 to 10 rooms you already need
If your team is highly meeting-driven and you tend to add people late (sales engineers, leadership, partner managers), lean toward the higher end. If headcount is locked and travel is tightly approved, lean lower.
Step 4: Prioritize walkability and predictable routes over “nice to have” features
For CES week, the most valuable hotel feature is not the lobby or the view. It is the ability to get to your anchor campus reliably.
When evaluating properties, rank them in this order:
- Distance and route simplicity to your anchor campus
- Check-in friction (late arrivals, ID requirements, incidentals process)
- On-site spaces you can use for quick team syncs (quiet corners, business center style areas)
- Room layouts that support long days (desk space, quiet HVAC, reliable Wi-Fi)
If your anchor is LVCC, pay attention to internal LVCC travel time too. The LVCC West Hall can be meaningfully far from other halls on foot, and the LVCC Loop can change your day when your schedule bounces between halls.
Step 5: Policies that reduce no-show risk and “orphan rooms”
No-show risk is a mix of traveler behavior and booking terms. The way to reduce it is to set rules your travelers actually follow.
Internal team rules (simple, enforceable):
- Require each traveler to confirm arrival and departure dates by a specific internal deadline.
- Set a single travel owner who controls name changes and cancellations.
- Establish a same-day check-in protocol for late flights (who calls the hotel, when, and what they say).
Block and booking guardrails (what to ask for, in plain language):
- A clear room release schedule so you can drop unused rooms as your attendee list tightens.
- Name list deadlines that match your real planning timeline.
- Clarity on what happens if a traveler arrives after midnight.
CES is explicit that supply tightens and some hotels sell out as the event approaches, which increases the temptation to hold rooms “just in case.” The goal is to hold enough rooms to stay together, then release aggressively as you gain certainty.
Step 6: A practical “keep the team close” operating plan
Even with the right hotel, teams still drift without structure. A conference-week operating plan keeps everyone moving:
- One daily kickoff time (15 minutes, same place, same time)
- Two arrival waves (early and late) with a single point of contact per wave
- A shared map plan (campus, halls, meeting locations), CES provides official floor plan tools designed for planning.
- A default internal buffer between meetings to account for venue-to-venue movement, especially if LVCC West Hall is involved.
