Re: Hotel situation

[tom p. <[e-mail]>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jari Arkko" <[e-mail]>
To: "Mary Barnes" <[e-mail]>; "Eric Gray"
<[e-mail]>
Cc: "IETF Discussion" <[e-mail]>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2016 8:27 PM

Eric, Mary,

> And this has been a worsening trend.  I've attended most IETF meetings
in the last 20 years (I have the t-shirts to prove it) and I can
remember when it was still possible to book a room at one of the meeting
hotels at the IETF rate at least up to the block cut-off date (as
opposed to an hour after the hotel information is made available).

I think you are right, and we need to fix that.

> Something changed for IETF hotel bookings about the time of the
bubble-burst and most of us don't have any visibility into what that is.
We can speculate, but there seems to be empirical data that supports the
idea that it is not an unsolvable problem.

It is not, I think.

Still, it is a set of tradeoffs. The IETF has a set of requirements, and
one needs to balance them all. For instance, bigger room blocks mean
some more risk / smaller pool of hotels to choose from / at least
theoretically higher price. I readily acknowledge though that we have
not succeeded as well as we should have in some recent cases, such as
the BA hotel block size combined with the fact that the next hotels were
not across the street.

> [MB] My personal thought here is that the change has been due to the
fact that we seem to be going to more exotic venues and also to venues
that are more touristy destinations - e.g., Orlando during one of the
busiest weeks of the year, Europe in the summer, Hawaii in November,
etc.

Out of the last fifteen meetings:

Yokohama, Prague, Dallas, Honolulu, Toronto, London, Vancouver, Berlin,
Orlando, Atlanta, Vancouver, Paris, Taipei, Quebec, Praque, Beijing

I count only two (Honolulu and Orlando) that were clearly touristy
destinations. I’m not sure you should count summer meetings in Europe as
touristy, we still plan to meet somewhere during summers - unless of
course we go the Adelaides and Buenos Aireses during the northern
hemisphere summer :-)

<tp>

Jari,

>From my UK perspective, Paris has long been a major tourist destination
while Beijing now figures prominently and Berlin has its fans.  I
understand that from outside the UK, the Oxford Street shops are a major
draw to London, especially to those in China, Japan and such like so I
think that the touristy list is a little longer.  I would not say we
should avoid such locations - London in March seemed to work well - but
I would see it as a small mark against.  (On the other hand, a plus for
Minnesota is the (remote) chance of seeing the Vikings, so this issue
may be rather subjective:-)

I think that the availabillity of hotel rooms and work rooms should
dominate the choice.

Tom Petch


In any case, I think given our participants, it seems fair to have
something resembling the 1-1-1* circulation model. We could discuss
whether there should be more standardisation of the destinations in
those areas. In the last 15 meetings there was two repeats (Prague and
Vancouver) where I think we had successful meeting environments. We have
one announced repeat coming up soon, and the IAOC is working on several
more. I expect at least two of those to succeed, maybe more.

I take the guidance to the IAOC should be at least:

- make sure the room blocks are better sufficient than they have been in
last meetings
- use successful meeting places multiple times

What else?

> prefers Minneapolis

Personally, I love cold places, particularly during winter. But for the
record, Minneapolis has some drawbacks, too, such as flight connections
being somewhat limited compared to, say, Vancouver or Dallas or Atlanta.
In my experience, at least. The IETF has been to many hotels and cities
where we’ve had a great experience from their meeting environment and
sufficient availability of rooms.

Jari