At 16:01 13/07/2006, Sam Weiler wrote:
On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Henk Uijterwaal wrote:
I think it is quite simple: What matters to me is the total costs
of meeting rooms, breakfast, coffee and connectivity, or the stuff
covered by the registration fee. I'm prepared to pay a
registration fee at roughly the current level for those things,
plus the costs of my hotel room and plane ticket.
I'd expect you to be concerned about the total cost of
lodging+registration, rather than just the registration fee treated
in isolation.
Well, I care about the costs of the trip in total as travel is a factor
too. (And probably more about the costs of the bar, since I cannot
charge those to my employer.)
My point is that as long as we get the whole package, I don't really
care about what it says for the individual items. So what if we have to
pay for breakfast and coffee but get the meeting rooms free? Do you
really think that we'd get the rooms for free if we didn't order food?
Of course not, the hotels look at the whole package that we order and
come up with a price for that. Take out one item and the price for the
others will change.
According to the slides presented last night, the hotel room cost
subsidizes the other items -- IASA got a commission on the room block in Dallas
The commission usually requires that at least X people stay in the host
hotel.
and presumably will get one here. And, as Jordi pointed out, the
convention in many regions is for hotels to provide breafast, which
presumably shifts the breakfast cost from the meeting fee into the
hotel room cost.
The thing with hotel rooms is that they also strongly depend on the
location of the hotel, so it is not easily possible to compare a X$ room
without breakfast in city A, with a Y$ room with breakfast in city B.
One might imagine that we could even charge more for hotel rooms
and less for registration across the board.
But if you charge too much, people will start to look for hotel rooms
elsewhere and less people will stay in the host hotel. Which means
that we don't get the commission (or pay more for food and meeting rooms).
Bottom line: I think that the IETF gets good deals for registration and
rooms, I certainly don't want to second guess what they could have
negociated for individual items.
Henk
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Henk Uijterwaal Email: henk.uijterwaal(at)ripe.net
RIPE Network Coordination Centre http://www.amsterdamned.org/~henk
P.O.Box 10096 Singel 258 Phone: +31.20.5354414
1001 EB Amsterdam 1016 AB Amsterdam Fax: +31.20.5354445
The Netherlands The Netherlands Mobile: +31.6.55861746
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