We run events in multiple time zones.
This impacts cutoff dates, early bird dates, and more.
Our office is US Eastern, but we run events in Pacific, Central, Mountain, and Alaska time zones, plus England, Canada and other places.
If we set earlybird, late fee, or close registration, it all defaults to US Eastern so we have to tell folks to adjust accordingly.
Conceptuallly, it seems that
a). overall configuration - choose your default time zone.
b). date fields in event setup - choose your alternate timezone, this affects all other date fields for that particular event.