Tripp Lilley wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2000, Matthew Goldman wrote:
I also disagree with you regarding hotel rates. Pre-negotiated block rates
for meetings are around the same price as we paid in San Diego for a similar
type of hotel (clearly, Vegas hotels are both much better than and much
worse than the Sheraton San Diego). The only time hotel rooms are extremely
high is for major expositions -- like Comdex, Consumer Electronics Show, etc
-- because those rooms are not booked as blocks. The hotels jack up the
prices for those weeks. I've been to Vegas on a non-convention week and got
a hotel room for $70/night vs. $180/night for the same room during Comdex.
It would be up to the IETF to negotiate for 2000-3000 rooms; that's a lot of
buying power. If they can't get reasonable rates, then we don't go there.
Actually, geek conferences get the shaft in Vegas, because Vegas is wise
to the fact that geeks, knowing the odds, are much less likely to gamble.
That's why Comdex, Interop, and so forth, get such high hotel rates. Now,
if we assured them that IETF stands for "International Eaters of Tasty
Food", or similar, we might get a break... And we can point to the
frequent mention of "many fine lunches and dinners" in _Exploring the
Internet_ as substantiation.
Or we explain to them that we're updating RFC 1750 to include roulette,
blackjack and one-armed bandits as sources of randomness.
--
Henning Schulzrinne http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs