USENIX Conference Hotel

[Mark Horton]

There are other constraints besides the price of the hotel.

(1) There have to be enough rooms available for the 1000-2000 people who
attend the conference.  If you hold Usenet at the Motel 6 by the airport,
we could probably have a 20 or 30 person conference.  But for something
as large as Usenix, you need a cluster of fairly big hotels.  These are
usually downtown or near a convention center.

(2) They wanted to be near enough to the UniForum hotel and InfoMart to
allow people to get to it in a reasonable amount of time.

(3) UniForum was in town, sucking up all the hotel rooms.  I understand
that the only two choices within a reasonable distance of InfoMart were
the Fairmont (where it was held) or at the airport (which I'll bet is
incredibly noisy.)

(4) We don't need the shoe shine machines or the room service, but on the
other hand we needed a meeting room big enough to seat everybody, a few
smaller rooms for BOF's and meetings, and enough places to eat so we don't
all have to wait 4 hours for a table at the Denny's across the street.

Things will probably change in the future.  I understand there aren't
going to be any more joint conferences with UniForum.  The next UniForum
is next February in Anaheim, but the Usenix next winter is in Jan in Denver.

	Mark