MobiCom and CoRL 2026 in Austin: Travel Guide

Austin gets two conferences this autumn, two weeks apart, in the same few blocks. MobiCom 2026 runs from 26 to 30 October at the Austin Convention Center. CoRL 2026 follows from 9 to 12 November, based at the JW Marriott.

After writing a lot of these guides, Austin is a pleasant surprise: it is the rare conference city where the geography is not the problem.

Almost everything is walkable, with one exception

The two main venues are 370 metres apart. Every hotel we list sits within 850 metres of the convention center, and most are inside 350. You can pick on price and style rather than on commute, which is not true of Rome, Paris, Brussels or half the cities we cover.

The exception is worth catching before you book. CoRL uses three venues, and one of them is not downtown. The JW Marriott and the Hilton are the two you would expect, a couple of minutes apart. Bass Concert Hall is on the University of Texas campus, 2.7 km north, which is a half-hour walk or a short ride rather than a stroll between sessions. If the sessions you care about are at Bass, factor that in; if they are not, ignore it entirely.

Where to stay

Distances are from the Austin Convention Center.

Closest to the venue. Marriott Austin Downtown (details) is essentially across the street at 120 metres. Four Seasons Hotel Austin (details) is the splurge, on the Lady Bird Lake waterfront under 200 metres away with the hike-and-bike trail outside the door.

The mid-range cluster. Hyatt Place Austin Downtown (details) at 240 metres includes breakfast. Courtyard Austin Downtown/Convention Center (details) and Residence Inn Austin Downtown/Convention Center (details) share a building on East 4th Street. The Residence Inn has kitchenettes, which is the one to take if you are doing both conferences or splitting a room.

Reliable and slightly cheaper. Hampton Inn & Suites Austin Downtown (details) and Hilton Austin (details) are both around 350 metres, and the Hilton is itself a CoRL venue. JW Marriott Austin (details) is the CoRL main venue, so for that conference the walk to sessions is a lift ride. Hyatt Regency Austin (details) sits across the river at 830 metres, which is a nice walk over the bridge.

The full list is on the Austin city page, and the block-versus-independent question is covered here.

Getting in, and the airport catch

Austin-Bergstrom (AUS) is about 8 miles south east of downtown, which sounds close and mostly is. The catch is that there is no train. Austin has no rail link from its airport, so it is a rideshare, a taxi or the number 20 bus, and at conference-scale arrival times the queues are real. Budget 25 to 40 minutes and more at peak.

Downtown itself you will walk. Beyond it, Austin is a car and rideshare city: the CapMetro buses and the single MetroRail line cover a fraction of what you would expect from a city this size, and it is the one thing that consistently surprises visitors who assume a tech hub means good transit.

Between sessions

Sixth Street is the live music strip and the obvious answer, best Thursday to Saturday. The less obvious answer is that the better music is often on Red River and in the bars east of I-35, and that Austin’s live music scene runs seven nights a week in a way almost nowhere else does.

Barbecue is worth planning around rather than stumbling into. Franklin Barbecue is the famous one and the queue is genuinely hours long; la Barbecue and Terry Black’s are excellent and considerably more civilised. Any of them beats eating in the convention centre.

Lady Bird Lake has a 16 km hike-and-bike loop running right past the Four Seasons and the convention district, which is the easiest way to see the city without a plan. Zilker Park and Barton Springs, a spring-fed pool that sits at about 20C year round, are a couple of kilometres west.

One piece of timing. The Congress Avenue Bridge bat colony, around 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats that emerge at dusk, is one of Austin’s genuine spectacles, but the colony migrates south for winter. Late October is the tail end of the season and worth trying if you are here for MobiCom. By CoRL in November they will most likely have gone.

Late October and early November are the best weeks of the Austin year, incidentally: warm days, cool evenings, and none of the summer heat that makes June to September genuinely punishing.

If you are submitting rather than attending

MobiCom runs two submission rounds a year, a summer round closing in early September and a winter round closing in mid March, with notifications about three and a half months later. That structure is worth knowing because a rejection in the summer round can be turned around for the winter one without losing a year. It accepted 18.0% of submissions in 2024, which puts it in the tight band typical of networking and systems venues rather than the looser machine learning end, as we set out in the acceptance-rate analysis.

CoRL is the younger venue and the more interdisciplinary one, sitting between robotics and machine learning, and it has grown fast from a workshop into one of the field’s central meetings. Its position two weeks after MobiCom in the same city is a genuine convenience for anyone whose work spans networked and embodied systems.

If you are choosing between the two circuits more broadly, we made the case for the free and community-run alternatives here. Full details are on the MobiCom and CoRL conference pages.