On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 11:43:16AM +0100, Stewart Bryant wrote: > It seems to me that "no-smoking" is a pretty standard policy and relatively > simple to include and to police. _How_ is it simple to police? That's part of the problem with it. It's trivial to find out whether a given locale prohibits smoking or whether a given hotel has a no-smoking room block. It is quite a bit harder to be sure, two or three years in advance, whether that prohibition will actually be working in the Venue. In some parts of the world, I have been in hotels on non-smoking floors where I could actually see the smoke seeping out underneath someone's door. What exactly are we going to do in that case? Move the meeting? Remember, this is a document that is supposed to be about venue _selection_ (its short title actually is "Venue Selection"). I think it is reasonable to have an Important criterion that health and safety be taken into account. I think Mary's observations about spores and water-damaged ceiling tiles are likely to be helpful for future site visits, and I think the site visitors would probably make a remark if the hotel smelled strongly of tobacco smoke. But lists of specific prohibitions (particularly Mandatory ones) need to come with some kind of directive to action. For this to be really Mandatory, then, we need the requirement to be contractual language. If we're going to insist on a no-smoking-and-you-must-rectify term in our contract with the hotels, we're going to have yet another term that makes us hard to deal with and makes our prices go up. The same is true of other environmental contaminants. I am sure we could, if we wanted, put such terms in a contract. It's just what price we're willing to pay for it. So, how much is this worth to people? Would people pay US$500 a night for a hotel that would write that contract? If no, then it would be useful (to me, with my IAOC hat on) to know how much people _would_ pay for it. Otherwise, we're going to get best-efforts agreements, and these criteria can't be Mandatory and can't effectively be policed. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
