Re: Planned changes to registration payments & deadlines

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

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

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]