Re: [802SEC] Rome decision
Colleagues, I would like to remind our EC members that it is now quite a common practice in the Hotel industry to saturate the Internet with so-called "teaser rates" that sound like amazing bargains but cover only a tiny fraction of the rooms available. And as soon as those are sold-out the price escalates hugely as we have seen with some of our overflow hotels recently.
In our case for Rome, we asked for their largest available room block (550 of their 601 rooms) so that we are soaking up many of their rooms that would normally sell at premium or full rack rates of $300-600 Euros and so the average cost per room goes up significantly. So where it is perfectly possible to get a deal on a few rooms at a given hotel, to hold a sizable block at that hotel your rate will closely reflect what the hotels expects to net as an Average Daily Rate (ADR) across their entire inventory. That ADR for March 2009 is 260 Euros per day for run of the house rooming with 10% taxes so at today's exchange rates (1.485) you get the following:
(260 + 26 tax)(~1.485 $/euro) = $424.71 which rounds to $425. in my book.
So can we please stop 2nd guessing our choices and the data on this. And secondly I would like to remind folks, we started this process with 3 nNA venues of which 1 was discovered after the fact to not have enough meeting space available for our week (Geneva) and the 2nd was soundly rejected by the vote process (London) leaving us with the two strongest remaining candidates, Rome and Vancouver.
We have a fiduciary responsibility to our attendees (who, may I remind you, provide ALL of our funding for IEEE-802) to listen to what they tell us. We explained the survey at the Opening Plenary and they understood what it said, and they voted by a very significant majority to indicate that they would prefer to go to Vancouver in March 2009, and that we should shop for a better deal for a future plenary session. In the meantime we still have plenty of interim sessions in nNA venues where costs are more reasonable, and we need the time to develop a hosted nNA-plenary-venue where we can all afford to attend. I believe we need to correct this tragic mistake and I urge you all to reconsider this action before it is too late or we risk losing the confidence and support of our membership.
Thanx, Buzz
Dr. Everett O. (Buzz) Rigsbee
Boeing IT
PO Box 3707, M/S: 7M-FM
Seattle, WA 98124-2207
Ph: (425) 373-8960 Fx: (425) 865-7960
Cell: (425) 417-1022
everett.o.rigsbee@boeing.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Jeffree [mailto:tony@JEFFREE.CO.UK]
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 1:21 AM
To: STDS-802-SEC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG
Subject: Re: [802SEC] Rome decison
At 01:22 21/11/2007, Carl R. Stevenson wrote:
>2) The "average price" quoted is $244 ... why did our survey indicate that
>we'd be paying $425 (or was it $450)?
I just looked at the prices for March 2008 (they
won't quote beyond the end of 2008) and among the
various offers, Expedia quoted £97/night ($200).
In July 2008 the rate goes down to £81.
Looks like inflation will be raging in Italy during the 2008-2009 period...
I can't see anyone booking at the conference rate
if these kinds of rates are available elsewhere.
Regards,
Tony
----------
This email is sent from the 802 Executive Committee email reflector. This list is maintained by Listserv.
----------
This email is sent from the 802 Executive Committee email reflector. This list is maintained by Listserv.