Flame Re: Keeping costs down at Usenix in Dallas

[Henry Spencer]

> The hotel rooms listed on the Usenix flier seem expensive ...

This sets me off on something I've been meaning to bring up:

***FLAME***
It's obvious why Uniforum has more hotels booked than Usenix:  a bigger
audience.  This does *not* explain why the Uniforum hotels cover a
reasonable range of prices, while all three Usenix hotels are at the
EXTREME TOP of the price range!!!  I find it most unsettling that the
Usenix organizers, setting up a conference noted for attracting a lot
of us poor university types, ended up with three scandalously-expensive
hotels and NO cheap ones.  Especially since the Uniforum people, setting
up a conference aimed at three-piece-suit-and-expense-account people,
seem to have had no problem supplying a RANGE of prices.  The low end of
the Uniforum range of rates is about HALF of the lowest Usenix rate.
(The Uniforum hotels are rather spread out, but many people consider
this an acceptable tradeoff.)  There seems to be a basic misunderstanding
of the nature of the customers here.

On a practical note, it would have cost very little for Usenix to include
the locations and phone numbers of the nearest half-dozen cheaper hotels
in their mailing, even if no special rates could be arranged.  Those of
us who have limited budgets and no knowledge of Dallas would have
appreciated this deeply.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry