RE: COMMON - the week's over...

Why not have the conferences at the same venue every time? Wouldn't it be a lot easier for the Common staff? Wouldn't you have much more leverage in negotiations?

Bryan Burns
iSeries Specialist
ECHO, Incorporated
Lake Zurich, Illinois

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Dan Kimmel
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 7:00 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: COMMON - the week's over...

COMMON is a big conference. When you book a large confernce with lots of
meeting rooms and a convention center, you negotiate with the hotel over
the room rate and the number of rooms you guarantee will be filled. If
you don't make the guarantee, you must pay an "attrition" fee, also
negotiated at the time you booked the hotel. Scott mentioned an
attrition fee of $8K. That's a very small conference. Our attrition fee
for Reno was something in the neighborhood of $160K. As it turned out we
didn't have to pay it thanks to some pretty savy negotiations by our
staff. We had to take the food we'd committed to take, however, so you
saw lots and lots of food being put out and then thrown away. Nobody
went hungry.

We came very close to breaking even in Reno. We won't have the final
numbers for a month or so. It may break either way but will be within 10
to 20K of even. Trouble is, our budget relies on us clearing about a
million on the conference as the conference expense figure doesn't
include our staff and operating the office, phones, computers, etc the
rest of the year. Expense budget for the conference was just over a
million.

There's lots of "magic" involved in negotiating the room rate and
guarantee. You want the room rate to be attractive to attendees but not
so low you have to pay a lot directly to the hotel for the meeting
spaces and also guarantee a number of room nights you may not make. Also
this is done well ahead of the actual event. We booked Reno three years
ago. At that time we were expecting the usual 2000+- people to turn up.
As it was we had just short of a thousand. That number includes the
people in the booths at expo and others who weren't quite full time,
fully paid attendees.

I wish we'd thought of calling the $200 difference in conference vs
non-conference hotels a discount. It does come off looking like a
penalty. We needed some way to encourage people to stay in the hotel
rooms that pay part of the cost of the meeting rooms. Rest assured that
a room for five nights contributes far more than $200 to offset the cost
of the meeting rooms. Those of you who choose to stay in non-conference
hotels are freeloading on the others to some extent.

I hope we come up with some way to get our best speakers to the
conference. We haven't changed our policy on pre-conference workshops:
we still pay whatever expenses we were paying for those. Perhaps Scott,
Jon, and others could work out some arrange to do a workshop.

As time progresses we'll find ways to make sure we have value to offer
at the conference. We just have to ensure there's still operating money
to do the next conference.