Behind the Scenes of IEEE VIS 2024: The F**king Room Block

Posted on by

The following is part of a blog series that I’m putting together to record and express some of my thoughts and experiences from my time as a General Chair at IEEE VIS 2024. These experiences are presented from my perspective, but I want to emphasize that many/most decisions were made collectively with my co-chairs, Kristi Potter and Remco Chang, and many, many people were involved in the execution of the conference. All the credit for making the conference happen goes to these wonderful people.

◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆

Staying in the conference hotel is an important part of keeping our conference healthy. While understandably, it may not work financially for all attendees, having attendees together creates a strong community atmosphere, and it is an important part of venues bidding on hosting future VIS conferences. We often struggle to find venues because we don’t book enough room nights.

Carnac the Magnificent

When the TradeWinds contract was signed two years ago, we set up a block of rooms with approximately ZERO idea of how many people would want to come or stay in the conference hotel. Room nights are booked on a truncated normal distribution, and past history told us how many rooms we should expect “on-peak” (Wednesday night), which was 280.  I didn’t think much of this number at the time, and we relied on the experience of Loretta Auvil and Maria Velez (long-time finance chairs) and Michelle Ocampo from IEEE, but we did all this during the peak of COVID-19. So, it was really anyone’s guess.

August was an eye-opening month …

In early summer, the hotel set up the booking site for us, and rooms were slowly booked out of our block.

Then, August hit. People started booking a lot of rooms. We quickly started to run out of individual nights, even though we had plenty of total nights, and for obvious reasons, that caused problems. We had to repeatedly contact the hotel, asking them to add nights or move nights. They would help, but only in small increments. As time went on, we started to run low on total nights (a good problem to have). This created the need to add an addendum to our contract, which was a whole mess of its own. The result of all of this was spending way too many hours in August answering e-mails, on Zoom, and making phone calls about hotel rooms. Special thanks to Kathy Park, our current IEEE event planner (who I’m sure is sick of me by now), for doing so much of this. Note that I’m really downplaying what an enormous challenge this was for the team.

Oh the attrition

The from the conference perspective one critical hotel block concept is the attrition fee. In our original contract, the hotel assigned us ~1600 nights with an attrition fee for any utilization under 80% (this was revised to ~1800 nights and 90% in our addendum). The key idea is that for every night underutilized, the conference is financially responsible. So, under our current agreement, if we use 1620 nights or more (90% of 1800), no problem. However, if we only use 1600 nights, the conference is then responsible for the balance of 20 nights, a $5,000 expense! Keep in mind to 20 nights is only 4 5-night reservations. Obviously, this can be disastrous. The good news as of writing this is that the hotel block is very full, but we are still could be at risk if people change their plans and don’t use all the nights they have booked.

Being a Good Hotel Block Citizen

Here are some tips and tricks for being a good hotel block citizen (to some extent these matter less for this year, but keep them in mind for the future):

  • Book your room early! If we know we need extra rooms early, it is easier to get more than at the last minute.
  • Don’t book for more time than you need just because you’re not sure. Every night you book takes a night away from the block that someone else could use.
  • Don’t hold a booking and release it late! Similar reason. Further, releasing rooms late hurts our attrition if they aren’t taken by someone else.
  • Unused rooms due to being unbooked, CANCELLED, or EARLY DEPARTURE may HURT THE CONFERENCE FINANCIALLY. These unplanned costs can make future VIS conferences more expensive!

Obviously, things happen, plans change, and we have wiggle room built in. My goal is just to give you a sense of how your choices impact others and the conference.

I’m truly glad to be almost done worrying about the hotel block, and I hope to never have to deal with this problem again. That said, I’m remain excited for the start of IEEE VIS 2024. See you all in Florida!