Your Coworking Strategy Sucks During Big Events. Here Is How to Fix It.
There is a particular kind of panic you feel when you walk into your usual cafe at 9am, ready to work, and find it packed with people in jerseys watching a match that started at 7. Your table is gone. The WiFi is struggling. The barista gives you a look that says “read the room.” I have been on the receiving end of that look in three different cities. It does not get less awkward.
Major events (World Cup matches, conferences, festivals) destroy your carefully cultivated work routine. I have worked through SXSW in Austin, Web Summit in Lisbon, and now the World Cup across US host cities. My first event was a disaster. My fourth was fine. Here is what changed.
Book ahead or suffer
During the World Cup, coworking spaces in host cities fill up days in advance. During SXSW in Austin, every desk within three miles of downtown is gone by 8am. During Web Summit in Lisbon, spaces fill up a week before the conference starts.
Plan your coworking day passes before you arrive. Not the day before. Not the morning of. A week ahead, minimum. Most spaces let you reserve online. If they do not, call them. I have a rule now: book the coworking space the same day I book the flight. It has saved me more times than I can count.
The people who show up assuming they will find a desk are the ones working from hotel lobbies with terrible WiFi at 2pm. I was that person at my first SXSW. It was humbling. Do not be that person.
One more thing: prices spike during events. A coworking day pass that costs $25 on a normal Tuesday can jump to $40 or $50 the week of a major conference. Booking early locks in the standard rate. At Web Summit 2025, I paid 18 euros per day by booking two weeks out. People walking in paid 35. The math is not complicated.
Know where the urban stadiums are
This is a World Cup specific tip, but it generalizes. If a major event has venues in your city, figure out which ones are urban (surrounded by real infrastructure) and which are suburban (surrounded by parking lots).
Urban stadiums in World Cup host cities (Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, Seattle) have roughly 6x more coworking spaces within a 3 mile radius than suburban ones. You can work downtown and still make match time.
Suburban stadiums (MetLife in East Rutherford, Gillette in Foxborough, AT&T in Arlington) are coworking deserts. Do not try to work near these stadiums. I repeat: do not try. Work downtown. Commute to the match. Accept the travel time as the cost of staying employed. A 40 minute train ride is better than a $200 Uber surge from a parking lot with no cell signal.
Have a backup plan (always)
Your primary workspace will fail at some point during a major event. WiFi will go down. A private event will book out the entire space. The cafe will close early for a staff party. This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition. Across five major events in four cities, my primary workspace failed at least once during every single one.
Before the event starts, identify three workspaces: your primary, your backup, and your emergency option. The emergency option can be your accommodation if it has reliable WiFi. It can be a hotel lobby that is too expensive to be crowded. It can be a library. What matters is that you know where it is before you need it. I found out the hard way in Lisbon that “I will figure it out” does not work when 70,000 attendees are also figuring it out.
Match your work hours to event schedules
This seems obvious, and yet everyone gets it wrong. Including me, the first two times. If you have a 3pm match, your 2pm client call needs to move. If you know the city will be chaos after 5pm, front load your important work into the morning.
Block your calendar around the event schedule first, then fit meetings into the gaps. The people who try to squeeze work around events end up doing both poorly. The people who accept the constraint and plan around it do both well. I have been in both camps. The second camp is the only one that does not involve apologizing to a client at 11pm.
Next reads: World Cup host cities ranked for remote workers · Coworking vs cafe vs home: real cost comparison · How to stay productive without a home office