Why Do People Have Conferences in London?
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Most of the conferences I've been to have been at the Anaheim convention center in Anaheim, CA though.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Most of the conferences I've been to have been at the Anaheim convention center in Anaheim, CA though.
I was just there 2 weeks ago for Celebration. I love that convention center.
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Scott what kind of prices are you seeing that makes you say this?
I know Spiceworld Austin is like $399, is London $799?The hotel in Austin connected to the AT&T center was $200 a night. The last time I stayed in London at the Blue it was about the same.
We just found out that our new Star Wars Celebration will be in London (again) in July 2016. I'm planning on attending and I expect I'll pay around $250/night for a decent room.
It seems nearly impossible these days in most major metros to pay less than $200/night unless you want to stay in a crappy place.
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@Dashrender said:
Scott what kind of prices are you seeing that makes you say this?
I know Spiceworld Austin is like $399, is London $799?Price of the conference isn't a factor. It's the cost of getting there, staying there and getting around. The tickets are often free for entrance. Even if you pay full price (and who does that) it's a trivial expense component in the cost of attending the conference. A few hundred dollars to get in the door but easily thousands to arrive and stay. You are looking at hostel level accommodations just to get down to $140 a night!
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@Dashrender said:
We just found out that our new Star Wars Celebration will be in London (again) in July 2016. I'm planning on attending and I expect I'll pay around $250/night for a decent room.
It seems nearly impossible these days in most major metros to pay less than $200/night unless you want to stay in a crappy place.
That's why those expensive "major metros" is what I'm questioning. You don't get these prices in places like Austin, Las Vegas, Orlando, Malaga, etc. There are plenty of really nice places that are great for conferences that are 30-50% the price of places like London or New York City.
And the nightly cost is only one factor. It's the logistics, flights, intra-city transportation, etc.
Even coming from not far away, I can attend Austin cheaper for three days than London for two.
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@Dashrender said:
It seems nearly impossible these days in most major metros to pay less than $200/night unless you want to stay in a crappy place.
Outside of London I rarely have to pay that much for a family of four, let alone for a single person. Now I'm not hanging out in Paris or Tokyo, but I'm in bug cities all the time and the costs are nothing like London. London IS one of the handful of ultra-expensive world cities up there with NYC, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. It's at the very pinnacle of costs.
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The biggest increase in prices I see are for everything else. Taxi's are a bit higher in London (I hire a car or do a charter thing most everywhere I travel and it was a crap ton more in London).
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
800K. It's the fourth largest just in Texas. It's definitely a smallish city.
It's big by European standards. Only Birmingham and London are bigger in the UK. Are a disproportionate number of conferences held in London? I wouldn't know as I hate conferences and try and avoid them as much as possible. But a quick Google comes up with conferences all over Europe - I'm not seeing a massive focus on London.
It's not a "small" city. But it is positively tiny compared to something like London or even to Dallas or Houston.
It wouldn't even make this list...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_Europe
Not that all of those aren't large, but it's not comparable to the big cities. It feels more like Cleveland or Manchester, I would imagine. It has a nice city center but even compared to Sevilla it doesn't feel large because of the differences in how American and European cities are zones. I think you'd feel that it was pretty small too. The population, even in Austin which does this less than most American cities, just kind of sprawls and isn't what Europeans would consider a city. Walking the city center in Austin with over 800K people feels no bigger and with fewer municipal resources of a Spanish city of 700K.
To be fair, Dallas and Houston both officially inch past Madrid in population but Madrid gives the feel of a city many, many times their size. Because both Dallas and Houston are mostly open space, people have yards and there are cows grazing inside the city limits. It takes hours to drive through them and Dallas' city center is smaller than Austins. Madrid, by comparison, is all city center and then it ends.
This difference in city definitions makes it dramatically different between the US and most of Europe. What you call a city and what we do is rather different. If you were in "Austin" driving through fields and were told that you were in the city of Austin you'd be like "but this is a farm!"
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@Minion-Queen said:
The biggest increase in prices I see are for everything else. Taxi's are a bit higher in London (I hire a car or do a charter thing most everywhere I travel and it was a crap ton more in London).
It all ads up. It's a little bit here, a little bit there. Everything from dinner costing $50 instead of $10, Taxi being $20 instead of $12, travel from the airport being an hour instead of fifteen minutes, hotels being $250 - $350 instead of $80 - $160, a beer being $7 instead of $1 (actual price difference.) Any one thing seems silly. Add it all up and the difference in cost is enormous.
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Living in Spain we really see it. We are heading to Norway for a week in June. That one week is roughly the cost of two months of Spanish living!!
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I see alot of conferences in Vegas, Orlando, and Atlanta because travel to those cities is so cheap. Its pretty easy to fly in or out of Orlando for right around $100 (one way) from anywhere on the East Coast. Vegas seems to be even cheaper sometimes under $100 (one way).
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@IRJ said:
I see alot of conferences in Vegas, Orlando, and Atlanta because travel to those cities is so cheap. Its pretty easy to fly in or out of Orlando for right around $100 (one way) from anywhere on the East Coast. Vegas seems to be even cheaper sometimes under $100 (one way).
Exactly. And they are cities with huge accommodation to size ratios. It is cheap to get there, easy to get around, cheap to stay...
