PyCon US 2026: Why we're asking you to think about your hotel reservation

> Once your event outgrows academic spaces, donated conference rooms, or theatre spaces, working with the hotels is the industry’s standard way to pay for a professional convention center space. You commit to a certain number of hotel nights blocked off at nearby hotels, based on your event’s numbers from previous years, and in return, you get a reduced rental charge at the convention center. If you sell enough rooms, you additionally earn a small percentage of the revenue from those rooms, i.e. a commission. If, on the other hand, you don’t sell enough rooms, you owe damages to the hotels–essentially paying the full rate for the rooms they reserved for your event but didn’t sell.

Attendees pay the Hotel directly for their rooms. If the event does not book enough rooms to cover expenses then the organizer (PyCon) owes a minimum amount to the Hotel. If there are more rooms booked than expected the Organizer gets a check. This is a normal Hotel industry arrangement.

PyCon itself is run by the Python Software Foundation; according to publicly-available records they spent approximately US$2,491,000 on PyCon US expenses in 2024, including supporting 552 travel grant recipients: https://www.python.org/psf/records/