Re: IETF hotel selection mode and a proposal (was" Re: Hilton BA is Booked already?)

[Ole Jacobsen <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2015, Dave Crocker wrote:

> Effort to get decision-makers to have better empathy for the 
> rank-and-file is certainly useful.  The challenge is to make the 
> effort practical and sufficient. By 'sufficient' I mean it has to 
> cover enough of the core issues in ways that work.
> 
> In this case, hotel choice is only part of the equation.  Travel 
> time and travel cost are two other major factors.  So are additional 
> costs, such as food in the main venue. (We had one main venue with 
> reasonable hotel room rate but US$ 25 hamburgers...)

***OLE: I assuming you are referring to Yokohama, correct me if I am 
wrong. If you are: places to eat outside of the main venue were 
literally 3 minutes away with a huge array of options and prices. The 
same can be said about hotels, maybe by adding another 10 minutes to 
the most outlying properties, all well below $100 US per night. This 
is exactly the kind of venue that the community has repeatedly 
expressed a strong preference for, and while we would have liked the 
room blocks (and indeed the HQ hotels themselves) to be bigger, we 
heard lots of comments of the form "let's meet here again!"

> 
> To get better surveys, they need to be dramatically more carefully, 
> in terms of question formulation, respondent selection and response 
> analysis.  This is not a new or unmentioned issue within the IAOC 
> and meeting committee.  What we currently do produces results 
> dominated by well-funded, continuing participants who are highly 
> experienced travelers; in effect, we get a tourism response from 
> folk who are already likely to attend.

***OLE: At the end of the day it comes down to selecting a venue which 
will accomodate our MEETING requirements, we use A LOT of rooms for 
our meetings which makes that particularly challenging. This is 
driving us more and more towards convention centers which further 
dictates what the HQ hotel(s) are. The choice of city-centers with a 
range of neaby facilities, as preferred by our community, does not 
always produce the most perfect and most inexpensive outcome, but I 
disagree that it (by design) favors only the well-funded. It's 
certainly a trade off, and yes, we could do better, but I hope you 
realize that this would ultimately lead us to having MANY meetings in 
Las Vegas.

> 
> Choices like BA or Sydney inconvenience essentially all attendees, in
> favor of goals other than getting work done.

***OLE: Just to be clear, the IAOC did not choose Buenos Aires, the
IESG in dialog with the community did. 

> To date, there has been little interest in making the necessary effort
> to focus on requirements for being more inclusive.

***OLE: It's a complicated issue and it's getting more complicated
as attendance grows, the economy expands (prices go up) and so on.
It would certainly be *possible* to go back to meeting at some 
University campus...

Ole

> 
> d/
> -- 
> Dave Crocker
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
> 
>