On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, David Morris wrote:
If you care about hotel pricing, there is no excuse for complaining
about IETF rates in a location like Anaheim with dozens of alternatives
within walking distance.
So far, I haven't complained (at least not on this list). I've just
provided data. :-)
That said, I think it is fair to complain about rates at the meeting
venue. There is a benefit to being on-site, and it's reasonable for
us to be interested in the rates at the venue property. It may well
be that the IAD is making the right set of tradeoffs here, as
Spencer's note highlights.
hilton.com rates of right now have no relation to the rates which you
might have found 4 weeks ago ... any business with inventory like
hotel rooms, airline seats, etc. will frequently sharply discount
for very near term dates when they are below capacity.
You typically don't see airline tickets drop very much in price. And
if they drop by more than the amount of the change fee (if any), one
expects to see people cancel and rebook to take advantage of the lower
fare. And if it happens often enough, people learn not to pay the
premium for booking early, and the airline can't get early bookings.
Hence the pressure on revenue management folks to make good
projections and not need to drop prices late.
Similarly, I've rarely seen transparent hotel rates vary by this
much[1]. To be clear: we're now seeing a walk-up rate at this hotel
which is $75/night lower than our group rate. (Put another way, the
group rate is 63% higher than the walk-up rate.)
The magnitude of the difference in this case seems worthy of being
called out.
In addition, in some convention situations, room rates subsidize the
cost of meeting facilities. Don't know if that applies here.
I'm certain that it does.
-- Sam
[1] More typically, hotels offer lower rates through opaque channels
like Priceline and Hotwire. As an example, the San Francisco Hilton
was selling rooms on Hotwire for $89 during the week of our meeting
there last year. Our group rate was $235. Their transparent rate
(walk-up) was about $209. Less than our group rate, but not by as
much as the opaque rate.
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