Hi folks - New post up on the blog. We’d really appreciate your reading, sharing, and acting on this one: We’re under a deadline with the first hotel blocks closing April 20th, and with reservations where they’re currently at, we’re facing frankly scary damages.
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Wow, those are scary damages indeed. So much so that I’m wondering whether asking for an extension of the deadlines would be worth it (assuming it can’t hurt, but of course not worth it if there are negative consequences like breaking trust).
Also, it might make sense to think about a discount campaign, where you offer to cover part of the price of the hotel fees. If you model how much damages (X) you can avoid by offering a discount (Y) and it makes sense (X > Y), it might make sense to spend money to avoid paying even more money.
And I assume you’ve already done this, but pinging registered attendees about the blog post would make sense too.
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I wonder if it’s possible to flag a booking as being done for the conference, even when it wasn’t done through the conference website (due to administrative reasons).
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I second this question. We book accommodation through a separate system, convenient for the accounting. Maybe it would be possible to write about it to the hotel administration or to the conference team to consider such indirect reservations?
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There is, in theory, a way to reconcile guests who are attending the conference but did not book through the conference but it is not perfect. I spoke with Loren and asked her if there is anything that attendees can do to smooth the process over and she’s checking with the hotel provider (Orchid) as well as the individual hotels. I imagine she will update here when she has an answer. One thing that you can do (and I don’t know if this will help!) is too say that you are at the hotel for PyCon when you check in. The worst case scenario is that it doesn’t help, but it might.
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Hello! Sorry, I meant to respond to this a week ago, but we are in full pre-PyCon US mode and I haven’t managed to grab a minute until now.
To answer the questions about whether it’s possible to get flagged as having booked for the conference if you’ve booked in one of the hotels in the block but haven’t booked through PyCon US, we’ve put together a Google form to collect information (on an entirely voluntary basis obviously) for folks in this situation. The idea is we will collect this information, and then share it with the hotels to ask them to consider the listed individuals as having booked in our conference block.
To be clear, as Dan alluded to, there’s no guarantee the hotels will actually count these rooms as part of our total, so the only way to definitely be counted is to cancel and rebook through our system. But we understand that’s not possible for everyone for various reasons, so we’ve put together the form as a back up option that will hopefully help out a bit.
To respond to the suggestions:
We did ask and we were luckily able to get deadline extensions on two of the hotels, but the other two hotels declined our request.
Your logic is sound and I thought through the same thing, but we can’t directly discount the rates as we are locked into them contractually, and we can’t indirectly discount the rates by e.g. paying people money to cover part of the expense because there isn’t a way we have been able to find to do that while conforming to regulations of nonprofit spending. We did the next best thing we could think of and offered an incentive mystery swag to hotel block bookers.
Yep, we’ve emailed attendees who’ve registered but not booked hotels in the block.
FWIW we did also consult a lawyer on whether there was any way to get out of the contracts, and no dice.
Anyway, thanks for all the thoughtfulness, concern, and support! It’s really appreciated as we struggle through this situation, and community action/amplification does seem to be making a difference. As of today, assuming no cancellations (which is a bad assumption…), if bookings closed now, we’d be on the hook for just under $180K. Which is definitely bad, but it’s much less bad than it was a couple weeks ago. So we’re making progress, at least.
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