Eric, Mary,
And this has been a worsening trend. I've attended most IETF meetings in the
last 20 years (I have the t-shirts to prove it) and I can remember when it
was still possible to book a room at one of the meeting hotels at the IETF
rate at least up to the block cut-off date (as opposed to an hour after the
hotel information is made available).
I think you are right, and we need to fix that.
Something changed for IETF hotel bookings about the time of the bubble-burst
and most of us don't have any visibility into what that is. We can
speculate, but there seems to be empirical data that supports the idea that
it is not an unsolvable problem.
It is not, I think.
Still, it is a set of tradeoffs. The IETF has a set of requirements, and one
needs to balance them all. For instance, bigger room blocks mean some more risk
/ smaller pool of hotels to choose from / at least theoretically higher price.
I readily acknowledge though that we have not succeeded as well as we should
have in some recent cases, such as the BA hotel block size combined with the
fact that the next hotels were not across the street.
[MB] My personal thought here is that the change has been due to the fact
that we seem to be going to more exotic venues and also to venues that are
more touristy destinations - e.g., Orlando during one of the busiest weeks of
the year, Europe in the summer, Hawaii in November, etc.
Out of the last fifteen meetings:
Yokohama, Prague, Dallas, Honolulu, Toronto, London, Vancouver, Berlin,
Orlando, Atlanta, Vancouver, Paris, Taipei, Quebec, Praque, Beijing
I count only two (Honolulu and Orlando) that were clearly touristy
destinations. I’m not sure you should count summer meetings in Europe as
touristy, we still plan to meet somewhere during summers - unless of course we
go the Adelaides and Buenos Aireses during the northern hemisphere summer :-)
In any case, I think given our participants, it seems fair to have something
resembling the 1-1-1* circulation model. We could discuss whether there should
be more standardisation of the destinations in those areas. In the last 15
meetings there was two repeats (Prague and Vancouver) where I think we had
successful meeting environments. We have one announced repeat coming up soon,
and the IAOC is working on several more. I expect at least two of those to
succeed, maybe more.
I take the guidance to the IAOC should be at least:
- make sure the room blocks are better sufficient than they have been in last
meetings
- use successful meeting places multiple times
What else?
prefers Minneapolis
Personally, I love cold places, particularly during winter. But for the record,
Minneapolis has some drawbacks, too, such as flight connections being somewhat
limited compared to, say, Vancouver or Dallas or Atlanta. In my experience, at
least. The IETF has been to many hotels and cities where we’ve had a great
experience from their meeting environment and sufficient availability of rooms.
Jari
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