There are limits to how much you can get back from hotel room rates, depending on circumstances. In today's financial climate many organizations are trying to squeeze pennies out of travel expenses. There have been a number of articles published recently about increasingly close automated review of expense reports. If someone has to choose between (1) saving their sponsoring organization money and getting to go to all the meetings they want but costing the IETF some money or (2) being nice to the IETF but costing their sponsoring organization some money, perhaps violating their sponsoring organizations policies, and having to miss a meeting occasionally due to budget limitations, which do you think most people will choose? Donald -----Original Message----- From: Sam Weiler [mailto:weiler@xxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 10:02 AM To: Henk Uijterwaal Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Meetings in other regions On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Henk Uijterwaal wrote: > I think it is quite simple: What matters to me is the total costs of > meeting rooms, breakfast, coffee and connectivity, or the stuff > covered by the registration fee. I'm prepared to pay a registration > fee at roughly the current level for those things, plus the costs of > my hotel room and plane ticket. I'd expect you to be concerned about the total cost of lodging+registration, rather than just the registration fee treated in isolation. According to the slides presented last night, the hotel room cost subsidizes the other items -- IASA got a commission on the room block in Dallas and presumably will get one here. And, as Jordi pointed out, the convention in many regions is for hotels to provide breafast, which presumably shifts the breakfast cost from the meeting fee into the hotel room cost. One might imagine that we could even charge more for hotel rooms and less for registration across the board. There's some fungibility here, and focusing on just one of the participants costs (e.g., the registration fee) seems unwise. -- Sam _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf