On Tue, 18 Aug 2015, Nadeau Thomas wrote:
I am not trying to be confrontational here, but wouldn’t the lack of
these things you described above simply disqualify any hotel from
being our meeting venue? This isn’t the IETF’s first rodeo, so the
wide-spread frustration around this situation is because we’ve grown
accustom to meetings being held in places that did meet these
requirements. Even in relatively exotic locations like Hawaii, the
Hilton easily supported all of these criteria. I’d suggest that in
the future, if the hotel cannot support the meeting or its
attendees, that we simply do not hold it there. Problem solved. 8)
—Tom
Tom,
As Jared said, there are very few hotels in the world that have BOTH
meeting space for multiple parallel sessions AND 500-1,000 sleeping
rooms. (Excluding Las Vegas).
So, the hotel is not our meeting venue, we are meeting in a convention
center which happens to be attached to the Intercontinental hotel in
which we have a room block of 300 rooms (once all the technical issues
get sorted out etc).
We further have rooms in another large hotel, called the Yokohama Bay
Hotel Tokyu which is VERY close to the convention center too.
Depending on what floor your hotel room is and how lucky you are with
the elevators, the time taken to get to a given meeting room will not
be significantly different between these two hotels. There are also
several more hotels (contracted as well as not contracted) within a
short walking distance.
When the IETF last met at this SAME convention center in 2002 there
were maybe 3 hotels in total within walking distance to the meeting.
IETF 54 had 1,885 attendees and I don't recall hearing any issues
then with lack of hotel availability (see discussion about peak nights
vs full week elsewhere). This time there are probably something in the
order of 9 hotels within similar walking distance and we expect about
500 fewer attendees (OK, that's an estimate).
Toerless is right that there was a rush to open registration and in
that process some problems were exposed as Ray has explained. I am
confident that everyone involved is working hard to get it resolved.
Stay tuned.
Ole