4.9.2

Venue & Rooms

Describe your conference venue — name, address, timezone, working hours, lunch window, hybrid flag — and build the list of rooms with their tiers and capacities. Includes a Room estimate to size the room inventory.

Last updated: 2026-07-03

Purpose

The Venue & Rooms sub-tab holds the physical reality the planner works against. The top section captures the venue (name, address, timezone, hybrid flag, working hours, and lunch window); the bottom section is a table of rooms, each with a tier, capacity, floor, and optional virtual or parent-room settings.

When you use it

Use this sub-tab right after enabling the system and setting your defaults. The venue must be saved before you can add rooms, and rooms and the venue working hours feed both the time-slot generator and the session planner.

Walkthrough

  1. 1

    Open the Conference Leadership Console, select your conference, open the Presentation System tab, and click the Venue & Rooms sub-tab.

  2. 2

    In the Venue box, enter the venue name and an IANA timezone (both required, e.g. America/New_York), plus address, city, country, working hours, and lunch window. Tick Hybrid conference if in-person and virtual rooms coexist. Click Save venue.

  3. 3

    Check the Room estimate panel — you don't need session numbers first. From your accepted content (across all programs), the number of days, and slot length, it estimates how many keynote / regular / small rooms you need. Use the Posters control to choose how posters are handled: Display (poster session) — posters go on boards in a poster hall and do not take presentation rooms (it shows boards + poster sessions); or Short talks — posters get a brief slot in a regular room and are counted in the room totals. Use the estimate as a target for the room list below; if your venue already has a fixed set of rooms, just enter those and let Session Plan tell you how many time slots / days they need.

  4. 4

    In the Rooms box, click Add room. Enter the room name and pick a tier — Keynote, Regular, Small, or Custom. Choosing a tier snaps the capacity to your venue default (Custom leaves it free to edit).

  5. 5

    Set the capacity, optional floor, and tick Virtual? if it is a virtual-only room. Optionally choose a parent room to nest it as a child. Click Save on the row.

  6. 6

    Edit any room with its Edit button, or remove one with the trash icon and confirm. Repeat until every room is listed.

Save the venue before adding rooms

Rooms attach to a saved venue. If you click Add room before saving the venue, you will see a prompt to save it first. Deleting a room unassigns any sessions placed in it.

Tips

Get the most out of Venue & Rooms
  • Set Default Room Sizes on the Settings sub-tab first so tier-based capacities auto-fill correctly here.
  • Use Custom tier when a room's capacity does not match any default; the other tiers exist so the planner can reason about keynote vs. parallel vs. small rooms.
  • Working hours and the lunch window aren't cosmetic — the Time Slots Generate default grid action builds the day from exactly these values.
  • Use parent/child rooms for divisible halls (e.g. a ballroom that splits into A/B).
Open the Conference Leadership Console