Hello all,
having attended the IGF in 2010 in Sharm El Sheikh, I can only support it as a choice of venue.
On 25/08/2020 23:51, Yoav Nir wrote:
The people coming to IETF meeting are diverse. You’ll have people who require vegetarian food, and vegans and people with peculiar allergies or eating habits. It is usually far easier to serve all those needs in a big city with a lot of restaurants
than in a smaller place. When IETF met in Maastricht and in “Dublin” (actually a small town 15 km north of Dublin) there were a lot of complaints about the limited choice of foods. Now, Sharm el Shikh has 73,000 people making it a meduim-sized town, not
25,000 as in Maastricht, but it’s no Alexandria.
In the case of Sharm, the size of the town has nothing to do with the number of restaurants and their choice. Sharm is a special town in that it is secured by a ring of steel where if you do not have business or a hotel room in Sharm, you can't come in from
the rest of the country. Its economy is 100% focussed on tourism. It has been host to many international conferences and has hundreds, literally hundreds of restaurants in Naama Bay, in addition to the various restaurants in each resort. Taxis are cheap and
run 24h. As a venue in Egypt I can recommend it over Cairo which, although a town I love too, is much more polluted and stressful.
Many of the people coming to IETF meetings are cheap. Sharm el Shikh is very touristy and as such rather expensive relative to other places in Egypt. Rather than having functional hotels, the place is full of resorts. By the time the IETF is
ready to hold physical meetings again, tourism is likely to be in full swing as well.
Burger restaurants galore in Sharm. I agree it's more expensive than in the rest of Egypt, but it's cheaper than in Europe or North America. The only thing I find difficult about Sharm El Sheikh is getting to it internationally. Most people had to fly through
Cairo and some lost their luggage for a few days. There were a few international direct flights that were filled with tourists. But that was in 2010, perhaps there's been an improvement since then.
Kindest regards,
Olivier
