Re: Meeting Venue Preference Survey

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <[e-mail]>]

On 28 aug 2010, at 3:04, James M. Polk wrote:

> I'm going to pile on what Michael and Mary have already said, by saying the comparable list of cities (Minneapolis, Orlando, Vancouver, Barcelona, Prague) isn't even remotely close to including Maastricht. Each of the above cities are accessible internationally via air (as in: on intercontinental flights), and from many cities.  Maastricht has a very small airport that I'm not sure you can get to it outside of NL and Germany (I'm sure I'm wrong, but I'm not wrong by much). You certainly can't get to Maastricht from North America or Asian directly.

I've been critical about this beforehand, but let me defend Maastricht a little here.

You guys are applying American thinking here. Don't think of Maastricht as a town with an unusably small airport, but rather think of it as having a nice big airport (that would be schiphol, often called "amsterdam airport") that happens to be unusually far away from the city. If you fly into New York ground transportation is going to take a good while, too. From schiphol to Maastricht is worse, but only by a factor two or so.

Actually much of the confusion regarding travel was because there was more choice than usual: people were flying into three airports (AMS, FRA, BRU). From Frankfurt and Brussels the train travel was international, and as some people have experienced, the combination of international flying and international train travel is less than ideal. But apparently people preferred this to flying through schiphol. That's their choice. I'm pretty sure that as someone who doesn't drive going to the Anaheim meeting would have been more problematic for me than Maastricht.

Although I'm from the Netherlands I had never really visited Maastricht before, and I must say it's a very nice city. I'm looking forward to going back for a repeat visit.

The main thing I ended up disliking about this meeting venue was the location of the conference center in the middle of nowhere. Having to travel for at least 15 minutes just to buy a soda or a sandwich (outside lunch hours) was REALLY annoying.

All in all Maastricht is getting a passing grade from me, but I certainly hope that we can do a bit better in the future.