Caution: If Usenix does not meet its room block (as Jo pointed out), they get severely penalized. The net effect of this will be either to drive up the conference rate or to make it so that there is no conference. If a few people do this, it's not a big deal, but if a lot do this, they lose a lot of money. If they do not make the room block, it hurts Usenix first, and you later.
Another part of the deal that Usenix negotiates is for a fairly large number of meeting room space, which is typically above what most other organizations reserve for a conference of the same size. There are not that many hotels that are 1) in a centralized location that people want to go to for other things to do and choices to go to eat. 2) have a lot of meeting room space (tutorials, gurus, bofs in the evening) 3) have a suitable congregation space (hallway track - part of the reason that the San Jose convention center wasn't so great) 4) have 3-4 medium-large ballrooms for the main tracks All of these in one location narrows things quite a bit to not very many hotels. LISA is too small to make most convention centers practical. The hotels are booked several years in advance, typically. On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 5:21 PM, Brodie, Kent <[email protected]> wrote: > Two years ago, the LISA conference was in Baltimore. Yes, the hotel > conference rate was a bit pricy. Downtown $big-city-anywhere is > pricy. Sadly, my office could not afford to send me that year, so I > went on my own dime. (Note, it wasn't the hotel price.. there was > just no travel money for me, period.) As a gamble, I tried priceline- > and ended up getting a room, in the conference hotel, for about 60% of > the conference rate. > > My points on this are, > > a) Negotiated prices are just that, and there's a LOT of weirdness that > goes into the pricing. I have to trust that Usenix does its best. I > have been involved in many other conferences across the years, and I did > not ever consider Usenix conference rates and anomaly from any other > similar venue. > > b) BUT-- if you're unhappy with the conference rate, you certainly can > try booking yourself; through any of SEVERAL discount options available > to you. I tried one such avenue, and had great success. If you're > unhappy with the supplier, then find a new supplier... > > _______________________________________________ > 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/ > >
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