RE: Hotel situation

["Pat (Patricia) Thaler" <[e-mail]>]

3000 rooms there. If every attendee could get a room at the $180 rate,
then this wouldn't be such a bad deal. Seems like the opposite of the current
IETF problem: Large hotel with too many rooms that need to be filled. And
several other competing hotels in walking distance.

WOuld be interesting to know if IETF ever ran into the problem
of not filling up blocked rooms...

> The IEEE seems to have many fewer requirements / expectations from their
> attendees.
> For example, one of the recent meetings was in the Estrel in Berlin, a
> hotel which would not suit the IETF at all.

Why not ? 1150 room would be perfect size. Probably because IETF wouldn't
reserve enough of the conference space, so we wouldn't get a good deal with them ?

I'm not sure of all of the reasons, but:
1: there is basically nothing within walking distance. When I wanted to get out of the hotel for food I managed to find a (bad) gyro / curry wurst vendor. IETF people have repeatedly demanded many nice food places within walking distance.
2: There do not seem to be nearly enough break out rooms. A number of the IEEE meetings I attended were in guest rooms that they had taken the beds out of.
3: The food options in the hotel were quite limited. I really enjoyed the Schweinshaxe, but after the N days many people would probably get bored of it...
3: As far as I remember, their network infrastructure was, um, sad.

<pat> Actually, IEEE 802 meetings uses more break out rooms. Looking at one example, there were 24 meetings in the same slot. Because of the number of simultaneous meetings, sometimes the smallest ones meet in hotel suites.

It has been difficult to get hotels with enough meeting space outside the US so for Berlin we did sacrifice on nearby food options and ambiance (though with some exploring of the side streets I did find a decent coffee/tea place and some other cafes and bars). The hotel did have easy access to the S-Bahn, but even then one had to change to get to the heart of Berlin. <pat>

> Perhaps if IETF attendees didn't demand everything that we do (lots of
> breakout rooms, walking distance to bars and restaurants, no trains, the
> ability to install and run our own network, not being in Minneapolis, large
> cookies, specific price points, a willingness to keep going back to the
> same N locations) we wouldn't have so much kvetching.


<pat> IEEE 802 also requires the hotels to let our vendor install our network for the meeting space (but they usually don’t take over the network for the hotel sleeping rooms and our attendees aren’t as bandwidth hungry), our attendees want cookies and nearby places to eat, hotels that are reachable without a lot of extra travel time, and are sensitive about hotel price though perhaps not quite as cost sensitive as some of the IETF.

We do have a bit more willingness to go back to a place where we had a successful meeting in the past but we get kvetching too if we do it too much.

I’d rather have a hotel with enough room space that I could book a room in the hotel within a week after the bookings went live even if it meant that the nearby food options weren’t quite as good. And I don’t mind repeating successful meeting venues including Minneapolis. <pat>