Oof! We had HUGE problems finding a venue. Anyone ever try to book a hotel gig? More on that.
I always wondered why hotel restaurants were so bad, now I know. In order to book a room, a certain amount of revenue has to be kicked to the restaurant. If we wanted just the big meeting space and minimal stuff from the resto, we could drop a deposit but they reserve the right to refund it and cancel our contract if something better came along. Seriously! In other words, the entire event booking at hotels is really focused on driving revenue to the restaurant and the overnight bookings, not the event space itself. In fact, if we hit certain minimums, that room was free.
It took nearly 6 weeks to get prices from our first choice hotel and the quote looked like this:
PER PERSON/PER DAY:
$25 continental breakfast
$15 mid-morning snacks
$15 mid-afternoon snacks
$75 per line for internet (no wifi available)
They also wanted a minimum room commitment of 100 hotel rooms. Should all those rooms not be reserved, we were required to pay out of pocket for every single room not booked.
Ah, and I forgot to mention, if we had a wine sponsor & got free wine, the hotel wanted to charge us an $18 corkage fee per bottle.
ACK!
So, I finally went back to a venue I'd worked with before. It's about half the size we wanted but it turns out, I'm more comfortable throwing events for 150-200 than for 400.
The owner of this venue is super easy to work with. She didn't have the dates we wanted, so we bumped it out to a weekend in Mid-October. Then I had to go back & see if my preferred speakers were still available. Fortunately, they are. Whew!
Now, I'm dealing with website stuff. The first guy I talked to wants $3,500 to build one. While I respect the work, I don't think we need to spend that kind of money on one.
So, we're working out all kinds of details on the core logistics side.
Superstar speaker? I'm sure someone will surface soon. There are lots of authors on book tour in the fall so I'm working with publishers, seeing who's going to be headed our way. Stay tuned...
