Re: [Mtgvenue] I-D Action: draft-ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process-14.txt

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 11:43:16AM +0100, Stewart Bryant wrote:
> It seems to me that "no-smoking" is a pretty standard policy and relatively
> simple to include and to police.

_How_ is it simple to police?  That's part of the problem with it.
It's trivial to find out whether a given locale prohibits smoking or
whether a given hotel has a no-smoking room block.  It is quite a bit
harder to be sure, two or three years in advance, whether that
prohibition will actually be working in the Venue.  In some parts of
the world, I have been in hotels on non-smoking floors where I could
actually see the smoke seeping out underneath someone's door.  What
exactly are we going to do in that case?  Move the meeting?

Remember, this is a document that is supposed to be about venue
_selection_ (its short title actually is "Venue Selection").  I think
it is reasonable to have an Important criterion that health and safety
be taken into account.  I think Mary's observations about spores and
water-damaged ceiling tiles are likely to be helpful for future site
visits, and I think the site visitors would probably make a remark if
the hotel smelled strongly of tobacco smoke.  But lists of specific
prohibitions (particularly Mandatory ones) need to come with some kind
of directive to action.  For this to be really Mandatory, then, we
need the requirement to be contractual language.  If we're going to
insist on a no-smoking-and-you-must-rectify term in our contract with
the hotels, we're going to have yet another term that makes us hard to
deal with and makes our prices go up.  The same is true of other
environmental contaminants.

I am sure we could, if we wanted, put such terms in a contract.  It's
just what price we're willing to pay for it.  So, how much is this
worth to people?  Would people pay US$500 a night for a hotel that
would write that contract?  If no, then it would be useful (to me,
with my IAOC hat on) to know how much people _would_ pay for it.
Otherwise, we're going to get best-efforts agreements, and these
criteria can't be Mandatory and can't effectively be policed.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]