Subject: RE: Proposed 2008 - 2010 IETF Meeting dates

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 07:42:50 -0800

> From: Brian E Carpenter [mailto:[email-masked]] 

> It works the other way round. We fix our dates 2 or 3 years 
> in advance, avoiding clashes with other organizations and 
> international holidays as much as possible. Site selection 
> inevitably comes later, which means local holidays may 
> influence site selection, but not date selection.
> 
> Also note that local holidays may be city specific not 
> country specific.
> It's quite impractical to consider city holidays three years out.

Booking the Moscone three years out is the cannonical way that conference
companies fail. 

The IETF is nowhere near big enough for shortage of venues of sufficient
size to be a serious problem. If you are running a 10,000+ person conference
there are few venues that work, if you get to 20,000 there are serious
issues and you may get forced into doing advance booking.

The meeting could have been twice as large without straining the facilities
in Dallas. There are probably at least 500 hotels in the US that are
designed to take a conference of IETF size. The IETF is not a desperately
profitable conference from the hotel point of view but it does make more
money than an empty hotel. They are only going to be willing to offer the
type of rate the IETF is willing to pay if they are confident that no more
profitable alternative is on offer.

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