I don¹t think the fault lies in either out volunteers or AMS, I suspect we
are quite simply not being treated well by hotels.
I just now booked the Hilton, however not via the IETF link, because the
IETF link had no rooms available for the days of the week I needed one.
When I used the IETF rate link, it said there was NO availability for the
week at the IETF rate. I then logged onto to Hilton.com directly,
checked the hotel and was offered the $270 rate (plus 21% tax -wow!), but
it gave me the Internet Society rate - which was weird. So to get a
room, I booked through directly through hilton.com at the higher rate.
I had to do the same in Yokohama. I tried to book the Yokohama hotel via
the IETF within about 30 minutes of the announcement of booking being
open. ZERO rooms where available, but when I booked directly (at a much
higher rate), I was able to get a room.
>From a user¹s perspective this is great for the hotel. They can offer a
limited ³IETF² rate, that is very limited and hard to get, but they can up
sell attendees who are willing to spend more to get into the hotel at much
higher rate. This creates a false impression that the IETF isn¹t filling
the hotel because many people are booked in directly and not in the IETF
block. So the hotels can justify small blocks in the future.
The hotel¹s are the ones that win here. They get the IETF meeting rooms
and food costs. They sell a limited set of IETF rate teaser rooms. Then
they fill up the hotel with high rate rooms which are still taken by IETF
attendees. That seems like a very bad faith behavior on the part of the
hotel.
I¹d like to understand what¹s going on with the room blocks the hotels are
giving us. I know that hotels used to give us very good sized blocks and
they would take a while to fill up. Now they are filling up immediately -
or are they?
Q- What¹s the room block size we are getting at the recent venues
compared to what we got at previous ones like Vancouver, or Berlin?
Q - Are hotels artificially limiting availability of the IETF block by
only releasing parts of it to the web booking?
I¹ve seen hotels do this for other events. While the whole block
maybe 500 rooms, they release them in 50 room blocks as the
reservation block fills. This creates the lucky 10th caller
scenario, where if you hit it at just the right time you win.
-glenn