Re: IETF 100 Registration and Hotel Reservations Open!

[Tim Chown <[e-mail]>]

> On 26 Jul 2017, at 17:14, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Jul 26, 2017, at 12:07 PM, Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> I wonder if we need a ballot system for the HQ hotels?
> 
> Right now the system rewards those who are most attuned to the timing of the hotel announcement.   I actually have a filter in my email that notifies me when the announcement comes out.
> 
> I think it can definitely be argued that this is the wrong way to do things—I don't see it as being a particularly fair outcome that those IETF participants who are most proactive about signing up always tend to win.   Suppose everyone who cares about this were as proactive as I am.   Then it would just be a little bit more random who happened to win.
> 
> So, in principle, a lottery would be better, and maybe you get extra tickets if you lost last time (not sure how to make that work, but maybe some of the crypto wizards do).   The problem with this is that it's a _lot_ more tooling work for the secretariat.   I would hazard a guess that this is why it hasn't happened yet.
> 
> I don't think it's actually realistic to try to solve this problem.   But it does suck.   I suppose those of us who tend to win most often could voluntarily delay our registrations, but I doubt we could get sufficiently universal cooperation to achieve fairness.

In Singapore the second hotel is 85 metres away, the third is 200m, the fourth and fifth 500m, which is rather better than alternatives for many venues.  One of the 500m hotels is half the room rate of the main venue.  There’s more hotels being used, with the rooms spread more thinly between them.  The quick “sell out” of rooms may be because the main venue had only 160 rooms for the Saturday night before the meeting started, but 300+ for other nights.

If we can give such diversity in options for all meetings, assisted by local knowledge, that would help alleviate problems, as would giving some priority to those with genuine reasons to be on-site.

I note that it seems the IETF organisers organise around 700 or so rooms for us, so I assume 500 or so attendees found their own accommodation.  Presumably that 700 figure is based on past take-up of those rooms.

Tim