Colleagues, After some careful study of our current Registration
Process, we have noted some significant changes in how people register for
Plenary Sessions, and it is now causing some serious difficulties in our
preparations for upcoming sessions:
1) Nearly all of our attendees are now waiting until just before the
Pre-Registration deadline to register for the upcoming session, so we have
extreme difficulty estimating attendance prior to that cut-off date.
2) Most attendees are not booking their hotel rooms in advance of the
cut-off either and so we are having major concerns from our hotels. who see
<<100 rooms booked until just prior to the cutoff date. In these difficult
economic times, when many Groups tend to miss their numbers by large
margins, this causes an undue amount of paranoia from the hotel revenue
manager and we tend to get a serious curtailment of our usual goodwill and
support as a result.
3) In these difficult economic times it is very much harder to allow
significant numbers of attendees to postpone registration until they arrive
on-site because it causes overload of our on-site registration staff and
puts a huge uncertainty in our attendance projections.
Therefore we are proposing to implement some modification that will be
necessary to maintain our good reputation and attendance predictions going
forward:
1) We will advance the registration cut-off date by 2-weeks, from 17 days
prior to the meeting to 31 days prior to the meeting.
2) We will advance the hotel room-block cut-off by the same amount so that
they continue to occur on the same date.
3) We will adjust the Session Registration Fees to the following formula as
has been done in many of the WG interim sessions:
. Web Pre-Registration Fee (prior to 31-day cut-off) will remain at
$400.
. Web Registration Fee (after the Pre-Registration cut-off but at
least 7-days before start of session (Monday) will now be $500.
. Web or On-site Registration less than 7-days before or during the
session will now be $600.
We hope this will encourage our attendees to give us more advance warning of
their intentions and we will continue to allow fairly generous cancellation
provisions unless we see a significant change in the numbers attempting to
cancel during the last 31-days before the session.
These provisions will need to be made even more stringent when we begin our
adventure with non-North-American Plenary venues (e.g. Singapore and Macao)
since lead-times and advance warnings are much more critical to our
financial well-being in those types of venues, where penalties are much more
toxic. We do not wish to discourage future attendees, but rather to
provide some reasonable economic incentives to give us better advance notice
of their intentions. We hope our WGs will encourage their memberships to
cooperate with these changes so we can continue to offer some best value
arrangement with future venues by reducing the chance that bad projections
will cause a serious shortfall to blemish our otherwise excellent record for
consistently making our numbers.
Thank you for your understanding and support for these necessary measures.
J
Thanx, Buzz
Please note my contact info:
Dr. Everett O (Buzz) Rigsbee
Executive Secretary, IEEE-802 LMSC
7750 80th Place SE
Mercer Island, WA 98040-5912
ph/fx: 206-236-2229
cell: 206-818-4978
BRigsB@ieee.org----------
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