I think hotel rooms and hotel services are a very different market. First, there are few hotels that are big enough to meet any given convention's needs without being too big. They know it, and you know it, so you don't get to play hotels against each other very much. In fact, it's usually more useful to threaten to hold the convention in other town and get a local bureaucrat to chat with the hotel because the bureaucrat wants the income from the convention in his town and not that other one.
As for supply and demand, I would say that conventions aren't one supply and demand game but rather a composite of many supply demand scenarios put together. It's a funny game: if you want the hotel to provide any services, they often have to pay the service people for the entire day so you need to buy enough services. Buy too little, and your rate will be absurdly high. Buy enough room nights, and the hotel will eat the costs of many services. Room nights are king. Failing to sell out your basic room block is a financial nightmare. In this, I think that fan conventions have it a bit easier. They want no services (cost too much) and use lots of rooms :) And also: almost every hotel is dealing with bizarre, random and confusing labor union requirements. I'm pro-union, but the union rules around hotel services are random bizarre nightmare scenarios. Crazy stuff like no non-union person can touch a glass containing liquid, no non-union person can receive a shipment and stuff like this. If you are getting weird pushback from the hotel, ask about their constraints. They will usually show you the union contracts that limit them. (But likewise, don't believe them when they claim union problems without seeing proof) On Jan 9, 2012, at 12:56 PM, Luke S. Crawford wrote: > My comments as an armchair economist- I find this shit fascinating. > > The thing is, Microeconomics tells us that supply and demand shape the price > that is paid for a good, and that in a competitive market, that price should > be some reasonable margin above the cost of production. The thing is? My > experience buying products that are sold by professional sales people? the > sales person's job is to sell the product not at market rate, not at some > percentage above the cost of production, but instead to sell the product > at the highest price that you specifically are willing and able to pay. > > On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 11:26:01AM -0800, Jo Rhett wrote: >> I also work with a number of various conventions, providing technical >> services to them. I've seen the contracts and exact numbers involved in the >> room block size required to have conference rooms made available, and even >> the smallest LISA convention easily meets those numbers. All of these >> fan-based conventions manage to get really good discounts for their >> attendees: $89 and $99/night are the most common numbers. At the exact same >> hotels that LISA uses. And always on higher-demand holiday weekends at that! > > See, this is the bit that conventional microeconomics, I think, misses. > The thing is, the average LISA attendee (not all, but the average) is > willing and able to pay more for a room than your average fan con attendee. > Aside from the fact that many of us can either write it off our taxes > ourselves (or get our employer to outright pay for it) we are on > average a much higher earning bunch. That, and most of us think we > will receive monetary benefit from going; either learning new things > or meeting new people that will further our careers, so even if we > weren't higher earners on average, we'd probably be willing to spend > more. > > When you are negotiating with a salesperson, you are negotiating against > what the salesperson can get from other people for the same resource, > sure, but unless you have a competitive quote (and unless you can convince > the salesperson that you really don't care which provider you go with, > which is harder than it sounds,) you are also negotiating against what > the salesperson thinks you can pay. > > As a quarter-million dollar a year company, I find that I often get lower > quotes for the same good as my consulting clients, you know, companies that > have more revenue than what would be a reasonable salary for the employees. > > Looking at the large companies that I've worked for that got better deals > than my company did, they usually created a specification, then they got > bids from multiple providers. Of course, for most things, this is > difficult, simply because writing specifications that are so detailed > that the products are, in fact, functionally equivalent is a difficult > task. > > I've personally found that when I've done something like that? specified > a product or service and gotten quotes from multiple vendors? I often pay > 25% what I was initially quoted. > > (Of course, if you are big, you can send out your spec and ask for requests > for quotes. When you are my size, you need to look at what products > are available, decide which are comparable, then ask for quotes, and > pass the quotes to the other providers, then you argue, etc, etc. It's a > huge pain in the ass. I'll pay a premium for a provider/product where > the price on the webpage is the real price.) > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ -- Jo Rhett Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and other randomness
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