On 21.08.2018 20:24, Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana wrote:
De: "stefanor" <stefanor@debian.org>
That does give us some time to get a full budget, and see if we actually need 268 beds...Sure. To deal with hotels is very different from deal with student accommodation or on site accommodation because when you reservate them and start to pay, it's not easy cancel everything. The hotels are reservating the rooms to us instead give to other guests, so, If we cancel the reservation, they will theoretically suffer.
I think you are overthinking about "them". BTW I can tell you that dealing with student accommodation is much more difficult, because they care less, and there is much more bureaucracy. Hotels are business, and they offer us what they are supposed to do.
Please do no think that they will suffer. This is business, you should care about Debian and Debconf. They will care themself about their business. Web booking sites takes 30% to 50% of the room price (and a lot of nearly extortion points on contracts). I do no think we are so bad.
As far I know, it will be low season, so the hotels are probably very happy to have so much room occupies. Additionally on low season people tend to book hotels later (usually less then 2 to 3 months in advance, I do not know if in Brazil it is so). So they should be really happy with us. Very happy.
I would try to contract something like: correct number +- 50% now, 30% in march, +- 20% in may, +- 10% 30 days before [just as starting point, we could IMHO accept also less].
An other concern is about how to handle non-bursary people. If it is in hotel, I would assume more people would prefer to stay in the same hotels. OTOH you (maybe) would prefer not to deal with them (us), and so give direct contact to the hotel, but so the number will be lower. Should we take the risk or the hotel?
A small note: if you open registration earlier, you will have much more non-reconfirmed and no-show, which sometimes give much more troubles (but I agree we should open registration early, but keeping open longer: just doing it in batch: approve early the top contributors (which we will approve in any case, also with a large pool). Then regular contributors, speakers and team members with debcamp plan (this will take also more from the two side to prepare abstract/plan), This could help planing (and I expect the higher travel expenses will be on the earlier groups), and not have huge batch to sort quickly by bursary (but maybe it requires a lot more work on classifying the groups).
Yeah, organizing a DebConf is full of trade-off ("perfect is enemy of good").
ciao cate