Skift Meetings – Skift Meetings Forum 2025 Video: Lessons from Austin and SXSW on ‘The City as a Venue’

In this video:

• With Austin’s convention center closed for a four-year renovation, Visit Austin and SXSW are reframing the city itself as the venue, using hotels, cultural landmarks, music spaces, and more as immersive event backdrops.
• SXSW leaders emphasize Austin’s authenticity and community spirit as irreplaceable to the brand, reinforcing its identity through decentralized footprints, themed neighborhoods, and partnerships with local venues and businesses.
• For planners, Austin offers strong infrastructure, collaborative hospitality networks, and incentives to offset added logistics and create attendee experiences that fuse professional programming with the city’s creative, cultural, and culinary character.

Austin’s convention center will be offline until 2029 for a major renovation — but as Tiffany Kerr, Visit Austin’s chief marketing officer, and Alex Casolaro, SXSW’s director of credential sales, explained at this year’s Skift Meetings Forum, both brands are seizing the challenge as an opportunity to innovate. 

Kerr likened it to a product launch, reframing the city as a “canvas” for meetings and events. Rather than relying on the four walls of a convention center, planners now have access to a distributed campus-style format, with programming spread across hotels, museums, live music venues, and cultural landmarks.

Casolaro, meanwhile, emphasized how deeply the festival and Austin are intertwined, calling the city’s independent spirit part of its DNA. While SXSW has expanded globally, its identity remains firmly rooted in Austin. For 2026, the event will create themed neighborhoods with “clubhouses” tied to attendee badges, encouraging discovery, community, and creative risk-taking. The decentralized model isn’t new to SXSW, but the convention center closure has deepened collaboration with hotel partners, local businesses, and long-time venue supporters.

From a practical standpoint, Austin’s 15,000 downtown hotel rooms, dense footprint, and experienced hospitality community make the shift workable. Visit Austin is even offering incentives to offset added costs like transportation or security. For attendees, the change enhances the sense of place, transforming transitions between sessions into moments filled with live music, food truck stops, and authentic encounters with the city’s culture.

This content was created collaboratively by Visit Austin and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.