AWS re:Invent 2026: The Prep Guide

AWS re:Invent 2026 runs November 30 to December 4 2026 in Las Vegas. With 60,000+ attendees, 2,200+ sessions, and venues spread across The Strip, preparation is the difference between a productive week and a chaotic one. Whether this is your first time or your fifth, here’s everything you need to know, based on my 5 previous years of hard won experience.

Costs

Conference Pass Pricing

The early bird discount is substantial - $1,200 off standard pricing. If your organisation is sending you, make sure whoever handles procurement registers early. This is non-trivial budget that catches people off guard if they leave it until September.

Where to Find Discounts

• AWS Partner Network - if your company is an AWS Partner, check with your Partner Development Manager (PDM) for potential complimentary or discounted passes
• AWS Heroes / Ambassadors / Community Builders - community programme members may receive complimentary or discounted passes
• Sponsor passes - if your company is exhibiting, a number of sponsor passes are typically included in the package - but be careful, as some only cover access to the Expo, which is a much cutdown experience giving zero access to keynote or breakout sessions

Bottom line: always ask your AWS contact before paying full price. There are more routes to discounted entry than people realise.

Payment Options

Conference passes can be paid for by credit card or charged to your AWS account. However, if you pay via your AWS account, be aware that AWS credits cannot be used to cover the cost. It must be paid with real spend.

Travel

ESTA / Visa

If you’re travelling from outside the US, sort this early: -

• ESTA (Visa Waiver Programme countries - UK, EU, Australia, Japan, etc.) - apply at esta.cbp.dhs.gov . It’s valid for 2 years, but I would apply early. It’s become much more regular for people to have ESTAs declined, or approved and then declined in recent years, leaving those individuals needing to get an emergency visa appointment - so don’t leave it until the last minute, as you might be disappointed to find you can’t travel. Cost: $40.27
• Visa - if your country isn’t in the Visa Waiver Programme, you’ll need a B1/B2 tourist/business visa. Start this process months in advance as embassy appointment availability varies wildly by country
• Re:Invent invitation letter - AWS can provide a formal invitation letter for visa applications. Request this through your registration confirmation, i.e. you have to have bought your conference pass and registered first

Don’t leave this until October. Embassy appointments book up, and a rejected ESTA with insufficient time to apply for a visa has ruined more than one re:Invent trip.

Flights

• Book as early as you can. Flights get expensive as November approaches
• Direct flights from major hubs (London, Frankfurt, Dublin, NYC, SFO, Seattle) are available but fill up on the popular Sunday arrival / Friday departure pattern
• Be careful with indirect flights - if you’re travelling from outside the United States you have to clear immigration, collect and recheck your bags at your first airport of entry. Many flight booking tools allow you to book connecting flights that only give you ~1 hour to complete this. I really wonder how many people make these connecting flights, or have to sit around on standby for the next one. My advice - leave at least 2 hours when connecting via US airports, or choose a transit airport via another country, like Canada, where your bags are checked right through to your final destination and you can pre-clear US immigration whilst waiting for your connection. One thing to note if you transit via a third country - check their transit requirements, as some have ‘ESTA’ like requirements. There’s no such issue on the homeward flight - bags can be checked right through to your final destination even if transiting via a US airport if both flights are on the same ticket.
• Consider arriving Saturday to adjust to the time difference (especially from Europe - Las Vegas is UTC-8) and be ready for the intensity of the full-on days by Monday. In recent years there have even been some pre:Invent activities on the Sunday afternoon
• Immigration can get very busy, especially when multiple flights from Europe arrive within minutes of each other, so allow 60-120 minutes to get through and collect your bags
• The airport is a 15-20 minute taxi/rideshare to The Strip

Hotels

The conference spans multiple venues along The Strip. Where you stay impacts your daily experience significantly. More on this below in the Venues section.

• Book through the re:Invent housing block - AWS negotiates group rates at the conference hotels. These are typically good value and include shuttle or monorail access
• Off-strip hotels are cheaper but add significant travel time
• Expect to pay $200-400+ per night for on-strip conference hotels during the event

Food and Drink

During the Day

Breakfast is available at some venues but not all - check the daily schedule. Snack stations with coffee, fruit, and grab-and-go items are scattered across venues throughout the day. On Friday breakfast is usually scaled back to a few hotels near Caesar’s Forum.

re:Invent provides lunch for all attendees. The food halls are large but get busy between 12:00-13:00. Pro tip: eat slightly early or late to avoid the queues. There’s no lunch on Friday.

The Venetian/Palazzo area and surrounding Strip restaurants offer plenty of alternatives if you want to escape the conference bubble for a meal. Budget at least $50-80/day for any meals not covered by the conference, more if you’re eating at Strip restaurants.

Evening Networking and Parties

The social side of re:Invent is as valuable as the sessions, getting some downtime after intense days is important, and many of the networking events provides some free drinks and food to help stretch your budget further. Here’s the rough pattern:

• Monday evening - Welcome Reception at The Venetian, included with your pass. Good chance to meet people early in the week in the Expo hall
• Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday evenings - vendor parties and community meetups. Check conferenceparties.com/reinvent2026 for an unofficial but comprehensive list. These range from intimate dinners to large-scale events hosted by AWS partners, and the lists will grow significantly between now and the end of November
• Thursday evening - re:Play at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds. This is the official closing party - live music, gaming, food, drinks. It’s massive. Shuttles run from 7pm, event runs 7:30pm to midnight
• Community events - AWS Community Builders, Heroes, AWS Ambassadors and user groups often organise meetups throughout the week. These are often the most valuable networking opportunities if you want genuine connections rather than vendor pitches

Sessions

Technical Levels

Every session is tagged with a level that indicates depth:

If you’re an experienced practitioner, target 300-400 level sessions. The 200-level sessions are useful for topics you’re exploring for the first time. Avoid going below your level - it’s frustrating to sit through an hour of content you already know when you could have been elsewhere.

Session Types

What Gets Recorded

Breakout sessions and keynotes are recorded and uploaded to the AWS Events YouTube channel within days of the event. Lightning talks are sometimes recorded too.

Chalk talks, workshops, and builder sessions are NOT recorded. These are the ones you absolutely should prioritise attending in person, because you can’t catch up later. The interactive format is the whole point - you can watch a breakout on YouTube, but you can’t recreate a chalk talk conversation.

Session Reservation (Booking)

This is critical. Session reservations typically open in early October and it’s a scramble: -

• Favourite sessions first - the session catalogue goes live well before reservations open. Browse it, favourite everything you’re interested in. You can filter by level, topic, and type
• When reservations open, be fast - popular sessions (especially workshops, builder sessions, and high-profile speakers) sell out within minutes. Treat it like booking concert tickets
• Have backups - favourite more sessions than you can attend. Your top choices will clash or fill up
• Walk-up availability - if you miss a reservation, you can still queue at the venue 30 minutes+ before a session. Walk-up seats are released if reserved attendees don’t show 10 minutes before
• Overflow rooms - the most popular breakout sessions sometimes have overflow rooms with a live stream. Not ideal but better than missing it entirely

Pro tips: -

• planning sessions - the Strip is large, venues are spread out, and travel is time consuming. Find your key sessions, one per half day, and then add in other sessions that interest you in the same venue. Chasing your ’top’ sessions all over the Strip is a recipe for attending very little and getting intimate with the traffic on the Strip, or doing 40k steps
• on reservation day - have the app open and ready. Know your top 10 must-attend sessions. Book those first, then backfill.

The Expo

The Expo Hall at The Venetian / Caesars Forum is where AWS partners and sponsors showcase their products. It’s enormous.

What happens there:

• Hundreds of vendor booths with demos and giveaways
• AWS service-specific booths where you can talk directly to the teams that build the services
• The AWS Village - hands-on demos of new services, certification lounges, community areas
• Networking spaces and meeting points
• Swag. So much swag

Tips:

• Don’t try to see everything in one visit. Plan 2-3 focused passes over different days
• The AWS service booths are genuinely useful - you get face time with engineers who built the thing you’re using in production
• the Expo doesn’t typically open on Monday until the 16:00 welcome drinks
• Tuesday/Wednesday are the busiest expo days
• Some booths offer demo theatre sessions that are short, focused, and surprisingly good

Venues and Transport

The Venue Map (2026)

re:Invent 2026 spans multiple venues along The Strip:

• The Venetian / The Palazzo / Caesars Forum - Expo, keynotes, many breakout sessions. The central hub
• MGM Grand - Deep technical sessions. If you want 400-level content, you’ll spend time here
• Wynn / Encore - Sessions and networking spaces
• Caesars Palace - New for 2026, potentially replacing some of Mandalay Bay’s previous role of deep technical sessions like the MGM Grand?

The Wildcard: Caesars Palace

Caesars Palace is being added to the venue lineup for 2026, with Mandalay Bay removed. Historically, Mandalay Bay hosted a lot of the deep-dive technical content (300-400 level) and was the ‘quieter’ venue away from the Expo buzz. It’s unclear whether Caesars Palace will inherit that identity or serve a different purpose. Watch the session catalogue when it publishes for venue assignments - this will tell you where to be.

Getting Around

The venues stretch from MGM Grand in the south to Wynn/Encore in the north. End to end, that’s close to an hour on foot, or 15-30 minutes by car depending on traffic.

• re:Invent shuttles - free buses running continuous loops between venues. Reliable but can be busy between sessions. Allow 20-30 minutes including wait time, longer at peak times due to traffic
• Las Vegas Monorail - runs along the east side of The Strip with stops near MGM, The Venetian/Palazzo area, and more. Complimentary for conference attendees during conference hours, so you won’t get free use to attend evening events
• Walking - viable between adjacent venues (Venetian to Caesars Forum is ~10 minutes) but draining over a full day. Comfortable shoes are non-negotiable
• Rideshare (Uber/Lyft) / Taxi - works but traffic on The Strip during re:Invent is brutal. Often slower than the shuttle during peak times, as the shuttles get priority access leaving venues

Which Hotel for Which Experience

Discounted rates are available when you book through the re:Invent attendee portal (available Nov 27 - Dec 5). Prices below reflect the discounted base rate before resort fees and taxes are added. Note that rates increase based on demand and some hotels may already have sold out of their cheapest rooms by the time you book.

As a rough guide: expect $139-$350/night for the room, plus $29-$40/night resort fee, plus taxes on top. Budget $200-$450/night all-in depending on your choice.

Conference venue hotels (sessions on-site, shuttle access included):

Sleep-only hotels (no sessions, no shuttle, but on The Strip):

These are available through the re:Invent housing block at varying rates. They don’t host sessions and shuttles don’t service them, so you’ll rely on walking, monorail, or rideshare to get to venues:

Cost key: $ = under $175/night | $$ = $175-$200/night | $$$ = $200-$285/night | $$$$ = $285+/night (base rate before resort fee and taxes)

Pro tip: Stay on the east side of The Strip, near the monorail stations (e.g. MGM Grand, Horseshoe, LINQ, Harrah’s), or at the Venetian/Wynn. These give you the best connectivity to the action and let you avoid the Strip traffic that plagues taxi and rideshare journeys, and to a degree the shuttle buses. The monorail runs behind the east-side hotels and gets you between MGM and the central venues in minutes without touching the road.

Practical Tips

• Comfortable shoes - you will walk 20,000-30,000 steps per day. This is not an exaggeration
• Layers - Las Vegas in December is cold (5-15°C / 35-55°F) but the venues are air-conditioned. You’ll oscillate between freezing outside and warm inside
• Portable charger - you’ll be on your phone constantly (session app, maps, messaging)
• Business cards or LinkedIn QR code - networking is half the value. Make it easy for people to connect
• Download the re:Invent app - session schedules, venue maps, notifications, and your reservation QR codes all live here
• Don’t over-schedule - back-to-back sessions from 8am to 6pm sounds productive but leads to burnout by Wednesday. Leave gaps for hallway conversations, expo browsing, and processing what you’ve learned
• The hallway track - some of the best conversations happen between sessions, at lunch, or waiting for shuttles. Be open to serendipity

The Timeline

Giving Back: Turning the Trip Into an Investment

Your company likely spent $5,000-$8,000 sending you to re:Invent (pass, flights, hotel, expenses). That’s a significant investment. The difference between it being categorised as “training expense” and a genuine return on investment is what you do with it when you get home.

Be a Force Multiplier

You attended so that 10, 50, or 500 colleagues didn’t have to, or perhaps you were chosen when many colleagues were not. Act accordingly: -

• Run internal recap sessions - within the first two weeks, present the key announcements and learnings to your team. Don’t just share slides; explain what’s relevant to your organisation’s roadmap, regardless of whether it’s confirmation of heading in the right direction or challenging the status quo
• Share session recordings - breakout sessions hit YouTube within days. Curate a list of the most relevant ones for your colleagues and circulate them with context on why they matter
• Write up your notes - even a short internal blog or wiki page per topic area is more valuable than you think. Six months later, someone will search for “that thing Mark mentioned about Iceberg” and find it
• Connect people - you met AWS service teams, partners, and other customers. Make introductions where they’d be useful to colleagues working on related problems

Seek Buy-In for What You’ve Learned

The most valuable outcome isn’t knowledge - it’s action: -

• Identify 2-3 services or approaches you saw that could solve real problems for your organisation. Write a short proposal for each: what it is, what problem it solves, estimated effort, and what success looks like
• Request a follow-up with your AWS account team - they can provide deeper dives, proof-of-concept support, or credits for experimentation on the things that caught your attention
• Propose a proof of concept - nothing turns conference inspiration into reality faster than a time-boxed experiment with a clear hypothesis

Frame the ROI

When your manager asks “was it worth it?”, you want to be able to say more than “it was great, I learned a lot.” Frame it concretely: -

• “I identified a service that could reduce our data pipeline costs by X%”
• “I made contact with the team behind [service] and they’ve offered us a deep-dive session”
• “I’ve upskilled three colleagues on the new announcements through recap sessions”
• “I’ve proposed a PoC for [project] based on what I learned - here’s the business case”

The $5-8k becomes an investment the moment it leads to a decision, a saved cost, a new capability, or a team that’s better informed. Plan for that before you even board the plane; it’ll increase your chances of attending again.

See you in Vegas.

Mark Ross is an AWS Ambassador at Atos and a multi-year re:Invent attendee.