--On Monday, 30 July, 2007 07:32 -0700 Bill Manning <bmanning@xxxxxxx> wrote: > an observation. IETF meetings have a fairly high hit rate on > selecting venues where the hotel is in the middle of > restoration. I've have come to the dubious conclusion that > this tactic is used to get reduced overall rates. Bill, I'd guess that it is not a tactic on the part of IETF but on the part of the hotels. Many organizations have had enough experience with hotels under renovation to exclude them from consideration so the hotels, in order to get meeting traffic, lower rates. They may, of course, also promise that the renovations will not be disruptive, but we have been told that story before, haven't we? To make things worse, the on-site hotel staff often have no direct control over the contractors who are doing the construction work. They may beg and plead with more or less success, but are rarely in a position to say and enforce "stop". This is just a suggestion (which I have made before) rather than at attempt to micromanage the IAD/IAOC, but I believe that, if a hotel says "we are being renovated but it won't cause you any disruption" we should be responding with "post a performance bond and pay penalties if there are disruptions". I imagine that would cause some facilities to rapidly lose interest in giving us drastically reduced rates to fill up their rooms and we would at least have a better understanding of what we were likely to be up against. john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf