Subject: Re: Meetings in other regions

From: Sam Weiler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:01:52 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Henk Uijterwaal wrote:

> I think it is quite simple: What matters to me is the total costs of 
> meeting rooms, breakfast, coffee and connectivity, or the stuff 
> covered by the registration fee.  I'm prepared to pay a registration 
> fee at roughly the current level for those things, plus the costs of 
> my hotel room and plane ticket.

I'd expect you to be concerned about the total cost of 
lodging+registration, rather than just the registration fee treated 
in isolation.

According to the slides presented last night, the hotel room cost 
subsidizes the other items -- IASA got a commission on the room block 
in Dallas and presumably will get one here.  And, as Jordi pointed 
out, the convention in many regions is for hotels to provide breafast, 
which presumably shifts the breakfast cost from the meeting fee into 
the hotel room cost.  One might imagine that we could even charge more 
for hotel rooms and less for registration across the board.

There's some fungibility here, and focusing on just one of the 
participants costs (e.g., the registration fee) seems unwise.

-- Sam

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From: "Eastlake III Donald-LDE008" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 11:02:06 -0400

There are limits to how much you can get back from hotel room rates,
depending on circumstances. In today's financial climate many
organizations are trying to squeeze pennies out of travel expenses.
There have been a number of articles published recently about
increasingly close automated review of expense reports. If someone has
to choose between (1) saving their sponsoring organization money and
getting to go to all the meetings they want but costing the IETF some
money or (2) being nice to the IETF but costing their sponsoring
organization some money, perhaps violating their sponsoring
organizations policies, and having to miss a meeting occasionally due to
budget limitations, which do you think most people will choose?

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Sam Weiler [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 10:02 AM
To: Henk Uijterwaal
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Meetings in other regions

-- Sam

---

From: Henk Uijterwaal <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 04:17:55 +0200

At 16:01 13/07/2006, Sam Weiler wrote:
>>I think it is quite simple: What matters to me is the total costs 
>>of meeting rooms, breakfast, coffee and connectivity, or the stuff 
>>covered by the registration fee.  I'm prepared to pay a 
>>registration fee at roughly the current level for those things, 
>>plus the costs of my hotel room and plane ticket.
>

Well, I care about the costs of the trip in total as travel is a factor
too.  (And probably more about the costs of the bar, since I cannot
charge those to my employer.)

My point is that as long as we get the whole package, I don't really
care about what it says for the individual items.  So what if we have to
pay for breakfast and coffee but get the meeting rooms free?  Do you
really think that we'd get the rooms for free if we didn't order food?
Of course not, the hotels look at the whole package that we order and
come up with a price for that.  Take out one item and the price for the
others will change.

>subsidizes the other items -- IASA got a commission on the room block in Dallas

The commission usually requires that at least X people stay in the host
hotel.

>  and presumably will get one here.  And, as Jordi pointed out, the 
> convention in many regions is for hotels to provide breafast, which 
> presumably shifts the breakfast cost from the meeting fee into the 
> hotel room cost.

The thing with hotel rooms is that they also strongly depend on the
location of the hotel, so it is not easily possible to compare a X$ room
without breakfast in city A, with a Y$ room with breakfast in city B.

>  One might imagine that we could even charge more for hotel rooms 
> and less for registration across the board.

But if you charge too much, people will start to look for hotel rooms
elsewhere and less people will stay in the host hotel.   Which means
that we don't get the commission (or pay more for food and meeting rooms).

Bottom line: I think that the IETF gets good deals for registration and
rooms, I certainly don't want to second guess what they could have
negociated for individual items.

Henk

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henk Uijterwaal                           Email: henk.uijterwaal(at)ripe.net
RIPE Network Coordination Centre          http://www.amsterdamned.org/~henk
P.O.Box 10096          Singel 258         Phone: +31.20.5354414
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1160438400 + 381600 = 1160820000.

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From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 10:45:43 -0400

Hello;

On Jul 14, 2006, at 10:17 PM, Henk Uijterwaal wrote:

>>> of meeting rooms, breakfast, coffee and connectivity, or the  
>>> stuff covered by the registration fee.  I'm prepared to pay a  
>> I'd expect you to be concerned about the total cost of lodging 
>> +registration, rather than just the registration fee treated in  
>> isolation.
>

I think that that is the way to look at it.

> The commission usually requires that at least X people stay in the  

Yes, which is why you generally cannot just not apply it to the room  
rate. At any rate, "money is fungible" and
anything lost from commission would have to come from somewhere else.

>> convention in many regions is for hotels to provide breafast,  
>> which presumably shifts the breakfast cost from the meeting fee  
>> into the hotel room cost.
>

Very true.

Regards
Marshall