From: Thomas Nadeau
One would think that when the IETF negotiates the room block/fees,
that this could be done as well. After all we are in many cases,
booking a significant portion of the hotel in question in addition to
its conference facilities.
Speaking as someone who has never arranged a convention... There must
be some difficulty given the IETF's use of sponsors. E.g., for the
Maastricht meeting, we were sponsored by SIDN, a Netherlands company.
This automatically restricted us to a fairly small number of venues,
which is going to make it harder to get good terms when negotiating.
In regard to cancellations, the situation is inherently poor -- if the
bulk of the hotel's business (or the profitable part of it) is due to
conventions, a freed-up room may not be easily resellable, as there is
unlikely to be another convention in the same facility at the same
time.
At root is that we are trying to negotiate a purchase at a discounted
price without committing to buying any particular number of rooms,
versus only a limited number of possible sellers.
Dale
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