Tripp Lilley wrote:
>
> On Mon, 18 Dec 2000, Matthew Goldman wrote:
>
> > I also disagree with you regarding hotel rates. Pre-negotiated block rates
> > for meetings are around the same price as we paid in San Diego for a similar
> > type of hotel (clearly, Vegas hotels are both much better than and much
> > worse than the Sheraton San Diego). The only time hotel rooms are extremely
> > high is for major expositions -- like Comdex, Consumer Electronics Show, etc
> > -- because those rooms are not booked as blocks. The hotels jack up the
> > prices for those weeks. I've been to Vegas on a non-convention week and got
> > a hotel room for $70/night vs. $180/night for the same room during Comdex.
> > It would be up to the IETF to negotiate for 2000-3000 rooms; that's a lot of
> > buying power. If they can't get reasonable rates, then we don't go there.
>
> Actually, geek conferences get the shaft in Vegas, because Vegas is wise
> to the fact that geeks, knowing the odds, are much less likely to gamble.
> That's why Comdex, Interop, and so forth, get such high hotel rates. Now,
> if we assured them that IETF stands for "International Eaters of Tasty
> Food", or similar, we might get a break... And we can point to the
> frequent mention of "many fine lunches and dinners" in _Exploring the
> Internet_ as substantiation.
Or we explain to them that we're updating RFC 1750 to include roulette,
blackjack and one-armed bandits as sources of randomness.
--
Henning Schulzrinne http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs
