Venue Considerations

One of the most important questions to answer for any conference is “where?”- not just the city, but more specifically the exact facility. As a metropolitan area with more than 2 million inhabitants, Austin has plenty of possible venues. The trick is narrowing down the list of possibilities and reaching an agreement with one of them.

An important starting point is to determine a list of requirements and “nice to have” features.

For instance, it would be really awesome if the venue has a working fireplace or firepit that we can use. It’s not really a requirement, though.

When running through some of my early planning thoughts, I said that I wanted to aim for 100-200 attendees and hopefully be able to grow to twice that before needing to find a new site. One of the 2014 PLC organizers encouraged me to think simple first. Not just in terms of venue size, but also programming. I was thinking about three or four sessions at a time, she encouraged me to stick with two.

I’m torn.

On the one hand, this is a distinctly low-budget operation. I might end up collecting cans or something to pay for hotel deposits and the like. Going small to start with should help keep costs down and make all sorts of planning easier. Heck, I’m going to have enough trouble finding good people to run two sets of worthwhile sessions, let alone four!

On the other hand, I get the distinct impression we need to go bigger because of currents and tides outside of our awareness. More programming means more reason for people to attend, and one of the big reasons for Hearthingstone is to build human-to-human networks in support of the Gods’ purposes. But larger venues will cost more and require more of a deposit, so there’s more downside if I can’t get enough people to come.

So, what size does Hearthingstone need? The Quality Inn in Fishkill could seat around 100 in a classroom layout, plus there was a breakfast area that could also seat people. Of course, some events were not “classroom style”, so the seating capacity was significantly reduced in those cases.

Even keeping things simple, I’d still like to be able to accommodate 200 attendees. This gives us some flexibility to have sessions that take up a lot more space than a simple lecture- ceremonies and hands-on workshops, for instance.

Here’s a rough map of the areas that have hotels in Austin. Obviously, there are some hotels outside of these spots.

The green areas have hotels that might work. The red ones I’m excluding because of things like high crime, too little meeting space overall, or because the area gives me a headache.

There are some moderately-sized convention hotels outside of downtown (the most expensive area) that might work, but then again they might be too big. Many convention hotels will offer discounted (or free) meeting rooms if attendees book enough “room nights” at the hotel. The question being “how many is that?” Will Hearthingstone be able to draw enough of a crowd to “comp” the meeting rooms?

In another post, I talked about the need to connect the venue via public transit (or shuttle) to the places people will be arriving- the airport, etc. Obviously, this is easier downtown and becomes harder the further out we go. In considering more downtown versus away from downtown, there are several trade-offs:

• Closer to downtown generally has better transit service.
• Further from downtown is generally cheaper.
• Further from downtown is generally less noisy and crowded, though not necessarily. Many other venues are either near the airport or a major highway.
• Closer to downtown often has a wider variety of services within walking distance, though again not necessarily.
• Ironically, downtown venues often have more access to greenspace because of parks along the river (“lake”).
• Downtown venues typically have the least parking and they often charge for it, while venues further out tend to have plenty of free parking.
• More of the venues downtown have meeting space large enough, whereas many of the further out hotels are simply motels and have little or no meeting space.

Personally, I have a soft spot for La Quinta because of their remarkably tolerant pet policy. We stayed almost entirely in LQs while moving halfway across the country with three cats. A cat breeder I know tends to stay in them for the same reason when traveling to shows. They also tend to be reasonably priced.

Unfortunately, few of them have meeting rooms larger than a boardroom. For instance, one that I stayed in last year (during apartment renovations) has only 2 meeting rooms and the largest seats only 35 people, classroom-style. The largest LQ meeting facility in town tops out at about 105 people. That might be enough, but it’s also the most expensive LQ in town ($175/night)- about twice the cost per night of the cheapest.

Speaking of pets, this raises another important point. Some attendees may be required to travel with animals- service companions and/or animals who work with them spiritually. While most hotels are pretty good about service animals, many are downright draconian regarding “pets”.

Another consideration is food and alcohol. Many of the more conference-focused venues will have their own catering service and possibly even an alcohol license. As I talked about in another post, we might need to provide food and (soft) drink for attendees, which becomes unmanageably expensive if catering is involved. As far as alcohol, if the venue has a license, we get into questions of “corkage” fees and/or waivers if any of our events involve open containers of alcohol- even offerings.

That’s probably enough ruminating about hotels and locations for one evening.

-In Deos Confidimus