What system do you plan to implement for Hotel/Altonimbus communications?Hotels don't like to have to deal with a lot of different people when they plan an event. It leads to a lot of confusion, and creates risks for unaffiliated agents to do take advantage of us or them. The main duty of the Facilities Liaison throughout the year is to coordinate all communications with the convention hotel. The Facilities Liaison sort of acts like a funnel on our end and the hotel (at least the Hilton I worked with for 2007) has a similar funnel person on their end. To properly accomplish that task of funneling, the Facilities Liaison should listen to the convention staff and convention community for what they need to know from the hotel, forward those questions to the hotel, and report back. This requires that the Facilities Liaison absolutely must be in reliable contact with everybody on the convention side as well as their point of contact with the hotel.
The Facilities Liaison should not be the only point of contact with the hotel but should coordinate all contacts. I was extremely cognizant of the problems that Sean caused by restricting all approved hotel contacts to himself only and then bailing. I will prevent that from occurring by selecting a few other individuals I can trust to keep me in the loop to serve as backup points of contact, authorized to communicate with the hotel's contact and trusted to coordinate through me what they are doing. This provides a protection for the convention community should I become unreachable and unwilling to do my job the way Sean did prior to his resignation.
I will most likely choose the chair (who is my boss
) and the treasurer (who pays the hotel's bills) to be other points of contact, primarily because they will already be familiar to the hotel and in communication with them. I will also appoint an assistant, should I be able to find a good one, who will be able to fill in for me immediately as a backup, and who I will also expect to act in my place during parts of the con when I need rest.
Sometimes, as I did with Jaki in coordination with the hotel's CCTV in 2007, rather than "run interference", I will put a staffer in direct communication with the hotel to coordinate an isolated task that I myself cannot contribute any useful input to, so they may coordinate their task without me slowing the process down. I will do this when I trust the staffer to handle the task exceptionally well and when I know my involvement is more of a burden and slowdown to the task than it is of use to coordination.
What are you plans so far as the space that we shall be renting?So far, I plan to leave the use of space up to the various other departments, programming, exhibitors, etc. As to the acquisition of space, I plan to ask for changes to our contract to cover any additional space needs should important ones arise, and I shall ensure the terms of our contract are clear (or have them changed to become clear) so that the hotel does not attempt to book another event in our space during Kcon.
I plan to contact other hotels in the area and discuss options for room block rates nearby, so we can get better rates for our attendees, hopefully at no risk to the convention, and so we can track how many room-nights the convention fills. Knowing how many room-nights overall we can fill is extremely useful to future contract negotiations because the more rooms we can offer to fill at our hosting hotel, the more leverage we have in acquiring cheaper rates or other benefits from the hotel.
What sort of services and arrangements do you plan to make with the hotel?Services and arrangements is rather unclear. Unfortunately, the hotel contract is already signed and that limits my ability to ask for very much in addition to what we already have.
However, I have already secured several options for general meeting space such as the room we booked for the annual meeting last weekend. By options I mean discounted rates for booking meeting space. We have five more such options to use during the year. I limited this to five because I did not know what the 2008 chair's preference would be in regard to general meeting location, whether they would want all meetings at the hotel or whether they want to hold some meetings in Salem or Eugene or elsewhere.
In 2007 I warned the hotel that there would be an extreme run on their ATM and they warned their bank - and as a result their ATM went through over $300,000 before their bank ran out of cash as opposed to the $50,000 it was originally was stocked with.
I will discuss options with the board to provide for food events that don't cost us a bundle. The tea party, host club, and VIP dinner cost us thousands of dollars in catering costs. I would like to plan as much as possible in advance in order to limit those extraordinary costs, and hopefully use the hotel's concession stand and restaurant sales as negotiating leverage to that end.
I will also explore CCTV this year too, though I don't have much to say because I left the coordination of this up to Jaki last year.
And I will respond to any creative and reasonable suggestions from forum discussion by exploring them with the hotel and reporting back on their likelihood, rather than simply ignore possible options. However, some suggestions that, for whatever reason do not get my attention, or may in my judgment be unfeasible, may go ignored.
Do you have any hopes for the 2009 Hotel? (specifics not necessary)Part of my job is to find the hotel for 2009 and to negotiate (get board approval for,) and sign a favorable contract with them. This may be the first year where we will be bound to return for a second year in a row, and based on what I have heard, contract negotiations in those situations can be unfavorable. So I will seek out and explore creative options, including returning to the Hilton in Vancouver by using the park across the street as our exhibitors' hall and (gulp!) putting gaming in the garage. I may discuss these options openly on the forums. However, based on my current knowledge of available spaces, returning to the Doubletree may be our best and only option.
Miles from the hotel can be deceptive, how easy is it for you to go to the hotel and speak with them in person?It is actually extraordinarily hard. Hotel staff like to work during inconvenient hours, usually when I am also working. And I work in Beaverton, about 30-45 minutes away from this hotel (depending on traffic). I will be relying primarily on telephone and email to stay in touch with the hotel, and I will arrange in-person meetings well in advance because it will most likely require taking time off from work, and not just for me but for others if I choose to ask other convention staff to be involved.
Do you have a reservation at the hotel yet?No, I don't. I don't expect to for another couple of months, at least, and probably won't until well after the hotel block rates have been publicized, but hopefully I will well before we run out of space.
What experience do you have with contract negotiation and "legalese"?Starting with other "legalese", I wrote the staff policies on the staff registration form, I reviewed and wrote some of the convention policies but that was mostly Meg and Brownie, I've pointed out an embarassing number of flaws in the current bylaws and I've spent a ridiculously long period of time trying to rewrite our bylaws, taking much care to consider implications and loopholes. Too long, I'm afraid. I wrote the bylaws amendments we passed at the annual meeting last weekend.
Contract negotiation? I've read the 2007 and 2008 hotel contracts and had one discussion with the 2008 hotel to work to repair unfavorable conditions in the 2008 contract. I've discussed with Sakuracon's Facilities Liaison the options available to us in negotiating changes to the 2008 contract. I have very little experience when it comes to actual contract negotiation, and that is probably the skill this position needs most of all right now.
What are some things you'd like from the hotel that we might not have had before?So many! I can say that for the first time we have options for our general meetings built into our contract, and I asked for that. I would like to see Internet access built in but the trouble with that is hotels contract with third parties for Internet access and that limits their ability to negotiate it with us, so I don't expect much to come of that. This is nothing "of the hotel" but I would like to discuss with a few banks for our own contract to provide the exhibitors' hall with ATMs, preferably at no cost to us and ideally for a profit.
Food catering is always a very sticky issue with hotels. We've been able to get away with ramen fire bowl attack without a problem but other events require the hotel's catering. I would like to do this without cost by leveraging the additional concession stand and restaurant sales that we are capable of providing.
Do you have any ideas for making parking easier?Ride the MAX to the hotel
It's the only way your parking will be free. Sorry, but some things are just impossible to do, and securing free parking for 4000 cars in downtown, only a few hundred feet from your hotel room, is one of those. If anyone wants to try, be my guest! I'll even do whatever I can to help.
This year we have a parking lot. If I have time and the option looks feasible I may attempt to discuss reduced or eliminated prices for parking in the hotel's lot but I haven't explored this in the least yet, it's still a pipe dream, so don't expect anything! I can inform people of nearby parking garages, but I also don't know what power I have to negotiate prices.
Although we have a parking lot, we have street parking that will cost money on Saturday and possibly also on Monday. Nothing I can do will alleviate that. Can you tell I'm not optimistic? Sorry.
