All FIRST teams competing at the 2026 FIRST® Championship will once again be required to use the FIRST Housing Program, unless they meet specific exemption requirements. After receiving feedback about teams’ experiences with the hotel booking system last season, FIRST and our official housing partner, ConferenceDirect have been working on improvements to the process and experience. This blog will share a few more specific details on those improvements.
First, system improvements have been implemented that will ensure that teams get the right information that they need to book hotels. More details on these improvements will be shared in a later blog post.
Second, FIRST and ConferenceDirect have reviewed the feedback about specific hotels from last season and have removed hotels that do not meet our standards.
And third, the largest change being implemented for FIRST® Robotics Competition will address the unique process of qualification and registration for FIRST Championship. There is a quick turnaround for many teams to register and book housing for FIRST Championship after qualification. For example, in 2025, nearly two-thirds of FIRST Robotics Competition teams at the FIRST Championship qualified during Week 6.
FIRST Robotics Competition is also unique in that many of the same teams qualify for and attend FIRST Championship every year. It can be frustrating for a team who feels certain that they will qualify for and attend FIRST Championship to have to wait until Week 6 or Week 7 to book hotels.
For the 2026 season, FIRST is going to pilot opening the hotel block to some FIRST Robotics Competition teams early, before they qualify for the event. Teams that qualify for this early access are the teams who attended all three of the 2023, 2024, and 2025 FIRST Championship events.*
The teams that meet these criteria will receive separate communication from FIRST about how to book hotels through the block early, including dates and restrictions. A variety of hotels located in different Houston neighborhoods, including hotels downtown near the convention center, will be available for early booking. Our expectation is that booking window will be in mid-January 2026.
Our goal with this change is to help get the teams that “know” that they are going to the 2026 FIRST Championship into hotels early so that we can free up capacity for teams who qualify late in the season to quickly get the support that they need.
Early access to hotels is a pilot for the 2026 FIRST Championship only. We will collect feedback following the event before deciding if we will continue to offer this option. We will also continue to listen to feedback about ways that we can improve the hotel process for all teams for future seasons.
*We tested several qualification criteria using FIRST Championship attendance from 2022-2024 compared to qualification in 2025 before deciding on this method. We felt that these criteria met the dual goals of opening the housing to a large portion of FIRST Robotics Competition teams and also being predictive of which teams would qualify in the upcoming season.
More details about the overall FIRST Championship Housing Program are in this blog post.