Hi John,
--On Monday, May 9, 2022 09:59 -0500 Behcet Sarikaya<sarikaya2012@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:On Thu, May 5, 2022 at 2:43 PM Ross Finlayson
<finlayson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 5, 2022, at 9:57 AM, IETF Executive Director <
exec-director@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
The IETF 114 meeting venue is at the Sheraton Philadelphia
Downtown. As
explained in the FAQ, you will need to register before you
can reserve a guest room at the venue.
Strictly speaking, this does not appear to be correct. The
link that I was sent to me (after I registered for the IETF)
to reserve a guest room was not specific to my IETF
registration. While it gave me the IETF-discounted room
rate, it would have worked for anyone, even if they hadn't
registered for the IETF.
For other on-site IETF meetings (before Covid), the link to
reserve a hotel guest room (at the IETF-discounted room rate)
was included in the IETF "Registration open" email. This
allowed people to reserve an IETF-hotel room (often a scarce
resource) early, while deferring actually registering for the
IETF.
Not including the hotel room link in the "Registration
open" email appears to be an (understandable) ploy to get
as many paid IETF registrations as early as possible.
Last time early registration carried a much bigger discount
than this time. That is my only real concern.
I'd add one. With online meetings prior to the pandemic, themeeting page(s) listed alternate hotels and similar facilitiesin the vicinity of the venue, ones that had been at leastminimally checked out in venue site visits. Apparently, thistime, not only is the main hotel not heavily discounted, butpeople looking for other options are apparently completely ontheir own. I can guess at some of the reasons for the former,starting with lower and more uncertain attendee numbers but lessso for the latter.
You're correct that pre-pandemic the IETF usually contracted with one or two additional local properties. Typically this was done to provide a less expensive alternative to the main IETF venue. However in more recent years we observed that these alternative venues were poorly-utilized and it was decided that the very minimal number of bookings did not justify the substantial amount of administrative effort required, except in those cases where the main room block was either very expensive, or insufficient in size.
Happily, the IETF 114 meeting venue (Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown) has offered the IETF a very reasonable rate ($190 USD) so we expect that most people will opt to stay there, and accordingly we have a sizable room block.
Finally, the hotel room discount that Behcet referred to was unique to Vienna, where the first 400 guest room reservations were at a highly discounted rate. It's highly unlikely that we will see something like that again.
Best, Alexa
john
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