+1 on the analysis. Which is yet another reason why i avoid booking conf hotel at higher rates. It would just support their rigged scheme. On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 05:54:27PM +0000, Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal) wrote: > 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 >