#5. Research the Conference Town

My first stop is the conference website. This will tell you the main location, partner hotels, specific deal for conference attendees, and who will actually be at the conference. This is a link to Affiliate Summit’s website, which is always great because they add in information about the conferences way in advance.

While most of us are great at planning ahead, I realize there are times when you might wait a bit too long and are unable to get a hotel room in the host hotel.

Never fear, TripAdvisor is my go to tool for finding a hotel in a decent price range that will not give you bed bugs. It is really great to get real opinions from regular people on the pros and cons of hotels.

My next step is looking into transit to and from the airport to the conference. It is so important to know if a taxi/private car is necessary or whether it is possible to take public transit. In the case of Affiliate Summit East in Philadelphia, it turns out one can easily take the SEPTA train for $7 to the conference center, as well as most of the sponsor hotels. This would also be true for IRCE, where one could take the CTA in Chicago for less than a $3 one way trip.

The ability to take public transit in addition to other costlier options helps, as conferences can sometimes result in bottleneck traffic, where it is much easier to walk to a train rather than wait for a ride.

Here at ShareASale, we are foodies. So one of the first priorities is finding great places to eat when we are at a conference. I generally use Yelp and OpenTable to navigate this process.

Yelp will allow you to see where the local folks eat, which is so important, and OpenTable allows you to easily make a reservation to avoid a wait. As we all know after talking and standing on your feet, the last thing you would like to do is spend a long time waiting to sit down for a meal.

While the majority of a conference is spent networking, learning, and generally working; I always like to look at potentially fun and easy things I might be able to do outside of the conference.

In order to find these activities, I navigate to Metromix. Metromix has a page for pretty much every city in the United States where a conference might be located. It also includes activities that range in price from Free to really expensive, so there should be something for everyone.

The weather is one of the subjects that seems like a no brainer, but a number of us were regretting not checking more thoroughly at #ASW13. Las Vegas was much colder than my hometown of Chicago that weekend and it made for some slightly under dressed conference attendees.

Definitely do check the weather and double check it the day before you leave for the conference, so that you will be set for any weather eventualities.