RecSys 2026 in Minneapolis: Travel Guide

RecSys 2026 is the 20th edition of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, and it runs from 28 September to 2 October at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center.

Two things about this one are worth knowing before you book anything, and neither is obvious from the conference homepage.

August 17 is a harder deadline than it looks

The early bird rate ends on 17 August 2026 at 23:59 AoE. That part is normal. The part that catches people is that the same date is when authors must be registered for their paper to appear in the proceedings. If you have an accepted paper, this is not a discount you can skip. It is a publication requirement, and it falls five days from the time of writing.

The gap is real money either way. Member registration goes from $800 to $950 after the 17th, and to $1,050 on site. Students go from $325 to $375 to $425. Non-members go from $950 to $1,100 to $1,200.

One more trap in the same place: there is no workshop-only registration. If you are coming primarily for one of the 15 workshops, you have to buy the combined main conference plus tutorials and workshops package, which is $950 for members and $400 for students at the early rate. There is no cheaper door.

How many nights do you actually need?

RecSys 2026 is not a single block of days, and the answer ranges from four nights to seven depending on which parts you are attending. The programme goes:

• Sunday 27 September. Doctoral Symposium, by invitation only.
• Monday 28 September. Ten workshops and tutorials, five in the morning and five in the afternoon.
• Tuesday 29 to Thursday 1 October. The three main-session days. Opening and first keynote Tuesday morning, welcome reception Tuesday evening, the 20th anniversary session Wednesday morning, closing keynote Thursday afternoon.
• Friday 2 October. Five more workshops, including the RecSys Challenge.

So if you are here for the main conference only, you want four nights, arriving Monday evening and leaving Friday morning. Add the Monday workshops and it is five, arriving Sunday. Add the Friday workshops as well and it is six. If you are in the Doctoral Symposium you need to be there Sunday morning, which means arriving Saturday and seven nights end to end.

Worth checking against your own programme before you book a refundable rate you then have to change.

Where to stay

The good news is that Minneapolis makes this easy. Every hotel below is within 900 metres of the venue, so you are choosing on price and character rather than on commute. Distances are from the Marriott City Center.

The venue is also a hotel. Minneapolis Marriott City Center (details) is where the conference actually happens, so your commute is a lift. It is the obvious pick and the first to sell out, which is the argument for booking it now rather than deciding later.

Closest alternatives. Hotel Ivy, a Luxury Collection Hotel (details) is 360 metres away, a 1930 landmark building with a full spa, and the splurge option. At the same distance and the other end of the price range, Holiday Inn Express & Suites Minneapolis Downtown Convention Center (details) has free hot breakfast and an indoor pool, and is the sensible student pick.

The middle. AC Hotel by Marriott Minneapolis Downtown (details) at 534 metres sits on Hennepin Avenue in the theatre district. The Lofton Hotel Minneapolis (details) at 640 metres is a Tapestry Collection property with a rooftop bar. Hyatt Regency Minneapolis (details) at 769 metres is the big reliable one, with a 32,000 square foot athletic club attached.

Two with actual character. Hewing Hotel (details) at 879 metres is a converted 1897 timber warehouse in the North Loop with a rooftop pool, and it puts you in the best restaurant neighbourhood in the city.

Canopy by Hilton Minneapolis Mill District (details) at 904 metres is the one with a genuine scheduling advantage. The Wednesday evening social event is offsite at the Mill City Museum, and the Canopy is 370 metres from it. Every other hotel on this list is between 1.2 and 1.9 km away. If a short walk home from the social matters more to you than a short walk to sessions, that is the trade.

The full list is on the Minneapolis city page, and if you are weighing the conference rate against booking independently, that is covered here.

Getting in

Minneapolis-Saint Paul (MSP) is about 12 miles south of downtown, and unlike a lot of American conference cities it has a real train. The METRO Blue Line light rail stops at both Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 and reaches downtown in about 25 minutes for $2, or $2.50 at rush hour. Trains run every 15 to 20 minutes from roughly 5am to midnight.

That is worth appreciating. We wrote about Austin yesterday, where the airport has no rail link at all and everyone queues for a rideshare. Here you walk out of baggage claim onto a train.

MSP is also a major Delta hub, so direct connections from most of North America are straightforward, and the international routes are better than the city’s size suggests.

About the Skyway

Every guide to Minneapolis mentions the Skyway, and it is genuinely remarkable: 9.5 miles of enclosed, climate-controlled pedestrian bridges linking about 80 downtown blocks, so you can cross most of the centre without stepping outside. Several hotels above connect to it directly.

Here is the honest note. In late September you will barely need it. Daytime temperatures sit around 12 to 20C, the autumn colour is starting, and walking outside is the nicer option. The Skyway is a January institution being sold to you in a September brochure. Use it if it rains.

One practical catch if you do use it: much of the Skyway runs through office buildings and closes in the evenings and at weekends. It is a commuter network, not a 24-hour one, so do not plan a late walk back through it.

Between sessions

The Mill City Museum is where the Wednesday social is held, and it is worth understanding what you are standing in. It is built inside the ruins of the Washburn A Mill, which exploded in 1878 and killed 18 people, and which made Minneapolis the flour milling capital of the world for the next fifty years. The museum did not restore the ruin, it built a modern museum into the shell and left the damage visible.

St Anthony Falls is right outside it, and it is the reason the city exists: the only true waterfall on the Mississippi, and the power source that ran those mills. The Stone Arch Bridge, James J. Hill’s 1883 railroad crossing, curves across the river beside it and is now a pedestrian and cycle route. It reopened in 2025 after a $38.5 million rehabilitation, ahead of schedule, so it is open for this one. The loop from downtown across the bridge and back is about 30 to 40 minutes and is the best short walk in the city.

The Walker Art Center is one of the strongest contemporary art museums in the country, and the adjoining Minneapolis Sculpture Garden holds Spoonbridge and Cherry, the Oldenburg and van Bruggen fountain that functions as the city’s unofficial logo. It is free to walk the garden.

The Guthrie Theater sits on the riverfront near the Mill City Museum, and its cantilevered Endless Bridge viewing platform is open to the public without a ticket. It is the best free view of the river and the falls in Minneapolis, and almost nobody visiting for a conference knows it is there.

For dinner, the North Loop about a kilometre northwest of the venue is where the restaurant scene actually is, not the blocks immediately around the hotel.

The workshops

Fifteen workshops run across the two workshop days, and the split matters for your travel dates. On Monday 28 September: OARS on online adaptive systems, CARS on context awareness, DaQuaMRec on multimodal data quality, IntRS on interfaces and human decision making, RecTemp on temporal reasoning, RecSys in HR, FRAME on research assessment, MuRS on music, GenAI-eCom on agentic and generative AI in e-commerce, and RecTour on travel.

On Friday 2 October: RecSoGood on sustainability and social good, USRW on unified search and recommendation, CONSEQUENCES on causality and off-policy evaluation, BEYOND on interdisciplinarity, and AltRecSys on reimagining the field.

If the workshop you want is on the Friday, note that it is after the closing keynote, so the cheap flight home on Thursday night is not an option.