Re: Planned changes to registration payments & deadlines

["Joel M. Halpern" <[e-mail]>]

Thank you Andrew.  That is helpful.  I am surprised and pleased that 
there are enough adjustments that can be made 7 weeks out to be helpful 
in managing costs.

Yours,
Joel

On 4/24/18 10:06 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 07:17:10AM -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
>> Can you say something about how the difference between 7 weeks and 4 weeks
>> is relevant to the meeting fee?
> 
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 07:39:56AM -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
>> To clarify my question, the earlier wording seemed to say that the early
>> registration avoided raising the rates.  From some of the other messages,
>> taht seems not to be the case.  Rather, there is some model that was used by
>> the IAOC to estimate the revenue increase if we allowed people who could
>> register sufficiently early to avoid the increase.
> 
> There are two ways that the early deadline for "early bird" helps us:
> 
>      1.  Some people will not decide whether to come early enough to
>          get the 7-week-out rate, and they will therefore pay more.
>          For those people, the change in policy is effectively a rate
>          increase, and it will increase our revenues.
> 
>      2.  Some people will want the early rate, and will register early
>          and pay for that.  That increases our early estimates about
>          registration revenues, and allows us to make early
>          determinations about expenses we might need to adjust in order
>          to make meetings break even.
> 
> As we noted both before and during IETF 101, meeting registration
> revenues are down.  They've also become somewhat unpredictable, with
> meeting revenues varying from historical trends and payment dates also
> varying.  We have lots of possible explanations for this, but nothing
> that is definitive.  Speaking personally (i.e. I don't know whether
> this influenced other IAOC members), one appealing feature of the new
> deadlines is the way it aligns the signals of registration and
> payment; our old approach tended not to encourage early payment, and
> the proposal we are making has an incentive for that (and compensates
> the IETF with more revenue when that signal is not present).
> 
> It could well be that meeting revenues are on a permanent downward
> trend, but if so that will also affect the size of the meeting we need
> to support and consequently will change our forecasts.  Good
> forecasting is super important when we are aiming to sign contracts
> with hotels a long time in advance of the meetings we plan to hold.  A
> more accurate forecast of lower revenue is, for these purposes, as
> good as an increase in revenue.
> 
> I hope that makes things a little clearer.  As I said, I don't want to
> speak for all IAOC members in representing their reasoning for
> supporting this, but I think the theme above was one of the prominent
> parts of the discussion and was important to me.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> A
>