1) I'm also in favor of Canadian venues for North American meetings.
2) On long term contracts, you can get some saving, but you have to be
careful. I have some experience with holding a convention in the same city
every year for decades. If you stick with the same facility year after year,
you go through a series of phases. The first year things can be a little
rough because they don't know your group. The second year they have learned
and for the next 2, 3, maybe 4+ years, things usually go very smoothly and
you get good rates and service (barring a change in facility
ownership/management). But, sooner or later, perhaps around 5+ years, the
facility starts to take you for granted, there is turn-over in the facility
personnel, whatever concessions they were giving you that were saving you
money disappear, the quality of service you get starts going down, and you
have to move to re-gain any advantage.
Thanks,
Donald
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Spencer Dawkins
<spencer(_at_)wonderhamster(_dot_)org>wrote:
I know you meant it in jest, but to be clear to everyone else, qualifying
a new venue is a lot of work.
One point raised during the plenary is that we might be able to save
money if we regularly return to a given venue. Is it possible to
quantify those savings based on experience in, say, Minneapolis?
My understanding is that Minneapolis kind of fell off the truck due to
problems with IETF attendees getting US visas, and not because of other
considerations. We've met there a lot in the past 10 or so years. People
complained, but not in ways that prevented us from meeting there repeatedly.
So if we were going to quantify savings based on return visits, could I
suggest that we pick another place to quantify (perhaps "Vancouver" - we've
been there a couple of times lately, and I happen to be sitting in a hotel
right now - but anyplace outside the US would work for the concern I was
raising).
Spencer
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