Re: IETF 97 - Registration and Hotel Reservations Open Now!

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 8/12/16 13:12, Dave Crocker wrote:
>    What it does /not/need to do is emulate administrative and legal 
> staff tasks of implementing those requirements.  To have the general 
> IETF community pore over contract details is to have invite 
> non-experts to debate about details rather than debate about 
> requirements. 


So, there's probably a balance to be struck here. Many of the provisions 
of these contracts are written for the benefit of the attendees. In lots 
of cases, these protections go against a hotel's interests, which means 
that the hotel will not be very motivated to spend a lot of energy 
making sure they're being satisfied.

However, if the people protected by these provisions don't know about 
them *either*, then they are effectively useless: neither party to the 
transaction will take action. I sent the following example to the 
meeting venue list some while back, but it bears repeating here, as it 
demonstrates the point quite vividly.

Flash back to IETF 86 in Orlando. Late Sunday, the venue hotel -- which 
had apparently overbooked quite severely -- began displacing attendees 
with valid reservations to a nearby, and significantly lower-quality, hotel:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/86attendees/m_udMZ-e75GxfW_qe45c8E6ZanU

The thing is, the contract had specific provisions to make sure that 
overbooking was handled in a certain way; and the provisions that the 
hotel had agreed to in writing were far superior to what actually 
happened. But because the impacted attendees didn't know about these 
provisions, and because (absent any challenge) the hotel had no 
incentive to proactively honor them, people had a thoroughly crappy 
experience.

After things started to go sideways, Ray posted the relevant contract 
provisions 
(https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/86all/iuQ4Q3xC4BgEPHuUUix7nrk4BXs), 
which actually look pretty good. Kudos to whomever set this up on our 
side. It's a shame that such nicely crafted contract clauses went to 
utter waste.

This kind of contractual information -- attendees' negotiated rights 
when hotels overbook -- should be in the hands of people before they 
arrive at the hotel. Had such been the case in Orlando, displaced 
attendees could have insisted that the hotel honor their agreement. Far 
from being withheld from attendees, these provisions should be published 
quite prominently.

/a