Mythcon in a hotel
Jul. 15th, 2010 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacMythcons have traditionally been held on college campuses, because in the early days the members were mostly impecunious students looking for cheap housing, and were used to living in college dorms anyway. Even as we've gotten older and slightly wealthier, and have sought out campuses that were less hilly, had air conditioning and shorter walks between buildings, and came with en-suite bathrooms, we've continued with college settings for good and sufficient reasons of seclusion from the noisy, commercial outside world, attractive atmosphere (yes, most of our campuses have been stunningly beautiful), and above all the cafeteria group meals which do more than anything else to cement a feeling of community that is the essence of Mythcon.
Occasional Mythcons that have been forced into hotels for logistical reasons have mostly been unsuccessful: abysmal programming space, insufficient isolation from other guests and the mundane world, and the lack of group meal facilities - these in turn in part the result of looking for hotels in the same price range as campuses.
Unfortunately, campus accommodations have been getting trickier in recent years, not just for the above reasons but because of increasing cluelessness in the college conference offices. I could tell you stories about the one two years ago ... Anyway, when intractable problems of this kind forced us out of our intended beautiful campus for this year's Mythcon and into a Crowne Plaza Suites set amidst the concrete sea of a commercial strip along a freeway interchange in deepest suburban Dallas, there was concern about what this would do to Mythcon, mitigated by two factors: that the hotel would cater all our meals so that we could dine together, and that - by the alchemical process by which convention hotels determine all their function pricings - it would all cost no more than we'd been planning to pay for the room and board package on campus.
And it all turned out splendidly. Nothing went wrong except for a brief loss of power one evening during a thunderstorm. The hotel forms a huge atrium with rooms along the outside walls and an elevator block in the middle with bridges leading out to the rooms area. Combined with a cool modernist architectural style, looking up from below it uncannily resembles a cell block, but the plastic vegetation on the bridges1 and the modestly luxuriant lounge area below mitigate the effect. A sufficiency of basic hotel function rooms - much better than some of the oddball patio suites we've used at past hotel Mythcons - extending out on ground level from the basic block in one corner served our programming purposes.2 The banquet was held here; other meals were in the hotel restaurant. Breakfasts were a basic buffet, and we were apparently almost the only guests present. Lunches (a cold collation plus soup) and dinners (hot) were also buffet and held in a comfortable multi-level private dining area.
As the hotel's title suggests, the rooms were suites: one large sitting room and a bedroom, plus bath. Comfortable beds and chairs; enough closet and drawer space, not always a feature of hotel rooms. Two TV sets, which is more than we have at home, not that we ever turned either of them on. Our room was right next to the hospitality suite, but amazingly, there was no noise leakage. I hadn't thought there was a hotel built since the 1920s with real soundproofing.
If we were cooped up in this building for the entire Mythcon,3 it was at least large and varied and pleasant enough not to leave a feeling of being confined.4 There were enough corridors overlooking the atrium to have our traditional Procession in. And not having to go outside, unless you wished to venture to the Starbucks down the street, was a further advantage, for while it was balmy enough in our atrium, outside it was still July. In Texas.5
So that was our site.6 And given these important provisions that were well satisfied this year - cost containment, comfort and a pleasant environment, decent group catering, and separation from other events - we could do it again this way. This, for once, was a successful experiment.
1. There were little planter boxes of grass on the lunch tables which also proved to be artificial. I was reminded of the line in a novel from a character complaining about her synthetic environment: "Do you realize these are artificial artificial flowers?"
2. A couple of other events were going on in other function rooms, but they had no impact on us at all. The oddest thing about the programming rooms was their pretentious English names, like Windsor and Manchester. Couldn't the hotel chain have come up with something Texan?
3. Except for Golfimbul, but that's a story in itself.
4. One Mythcon was held in a free-standing conference center which was literally locked up for the weekend, with nobody inside but us and the kitchen staff. The doors were locked from outside, so if you went out - not that there was anywhere to go but the parking lot - you had to know the keycode to get back in. We had the keycode, of course, but it still felt a bit creepy.
5. As General Sheridan said, and rightly too, "If I owned Texas and Hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell." He'd been there in July.
6. I'll write about programming later.
Occasional Mythcons that have been forced into hotels for logistical reasons have mostly been unsuccessful: abysmal programming space, insufficient isolation from other guests and the mundane world, and the lack of group meal facilities - these in turn in part the result of looking for hotels in the same price range as campuses.
Unfortunately, campus accommodations have been getting trickier in recent years, not just for the above reasons but because of increasing cluelessness in the college conference offices. I could tell you stories about the one two years ago ... Anyway, when intractable problems of this kind forced us out of our intended beautiful campus for this year's Mythcon and into a Crowne Plaza Suites set amidst the concrete sea of a commercial strip along a freeway interchange in deepest suburban Dallas, there was concern about what this would do to Mythcon, mitigated by two factors: that the hotel would cater all our meals so that we could dine together, and that - by the alchemical process by which convention hotels determine all their function pricings - it would all cost no more than we'd been planning to pay for the room and board package on campus.
And it all turned out splendidly. Nothing went wrong except for a brief loss of power one evening during a thunderstorm. The hotel forms a huge atrium with rooms along the outside walls and an elevator block in the middle with bridges leading out to the rooms area. Combined with a cool modernist architectural style, looking up from below it uncannily resembles a cell block, but the plastic vegetation on the bridges1 and the modestly luxuriant lounge area below mitigate the effect. A sufficiency of basic hotel function rooms - much better than some of the oddball patio suites we've used at past hotel Mythcons - extending out on ground level from the basic block in one corner served our programming purposes.2 The banquet was held here; other meals were in the hotel restaurant. Breakfasts were a basic buffet, and we were apparently almost the only guests present. Lunches (a cold collation plus soup) and dinners (hot) were also buffet and held in a comfortable multi-level private dining area.
As the hotel's title suggests, the rooms were suites: one large sitting room and a bedroom, plus bath. Comfortable beds and chairs; enough closet and drawer space, not always a feature of hotel rooms. Two TV sets, which is more than we have at home, not that we ever turned either of them on. Our room was right next to the hospitality suite, but amazingly, there was no noise leakage. I hadn't thought there was a hotel built since the 1920s with real soundproofing.
If we were cooped up in this building for the entire Mythcon,3 it was at least large and varied and pleasant enough not to leave a feeling of being confined.4 There were enough corridors overlooking the atrium to have our traditional Procession in. And not having to go outside, unless you wished to venture to the Starbucks down the street, was a further advantage, for while it was balmy enough in our atrium, outside it was still July. In Texas.5
So that was our site.6 And given these important provisions that were well satisfied this year - cost containment, comfort and a pleasant environment, decent group catering, and separation from other events - we could do it again this way. This, for once, was a successful experiment.
1. There were little planter boxes of grass on the lunch tables which also proved to be artificial. I was reminded of the line in a novel from a character complaining about her synthetic environment: "Do you realize these are artificial artificial flowers?"
2. A couple of other events were going on in other function rooms, but they had no impact on us at all. The oddest thing about the programming rooms was their pretentious English names, like Windsor and Manchester. Couldn't the hotel chain have come up with something Texan?
3. Except for Golfimbul, but that's a story in itself.
4. One Mythcon was held in a free-standing conference center which was literally locked up for the weekend, with nobody inside but us and the kitchen staff. The doors were locked from outside, so if you went out - not that there was anywhere to go but the parking lot - you had to know the keycode to get back in. We had the keycode, of course, but it still felt a bit creepy.
5. As General Sheridan said, and rightly too, "If I owned Texas and Hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell." He'd been there in July.
6. I'll write about programming later.
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-15 05:42 pm (UTC)BTW, I was in Texas last week (from the 4th through the 7th) and it was definitely cooler than Michigan, go figure. (But I was in the Wichita Falls area, so...)
no subject
Date: 2010-07-15 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-15 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 05:34 am (UTC)I'm tangentially involved in a (non-sf) biennial conference (approximately 400 people) that is so much better with shared meals, and the last one and the next one have been in hotels with only a couple of group dinners. I'd really like to learn more about the logistics of college campus gatherings and group meal plans.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 07:01 am (UTC)The campuses we work with assume group meals. The money for room & board is collected by the conference; we usually give a package fee (single/double occupancy and suite vs. dorm room being the presented options) which we create by toting up the itemized costs; attendees who need to arrive/leave late/early are dealt with individually, except that a simple "extra night (and associated meals)" option is also sometimes presented.
The money is handed over to the site in a lump by their deadline, typically 2-3 weeks in advance of the event. All they need for meals is hard numbers for individual meals; they don't care about our packages. Typically they include a small percentage overage for last-minute squeeze-ins.
Rooming is more difficult. For attendees who don't have their own roommate choices, we need to assign those, and hand over the lists by the deadline. Aside from type of room (dorm/suite), and requests for noisy v. quiet wings, which we hope will be followed, we have no control over the location of the individual assignments.
Menus may be selected from a list of options for "banquet" meals (which may be either buffet or served), which are more expensive; other meals come from the regular meal rotation. Times can sometimes be adjusted slightly. Typically service is for 90 to 120 minutes; we typically have programming running half an hour into the lunch period, so as to maximize options. Breakfasts are typically 7-9 AM, which can be tough for people used to SF cons to get used to.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 10:36 am (UTC)Personally I was very pleased with CPS as well; there are a number of SF cons held there (and a couple of literary ones that overlapped with us!). I never turned on my TV either until I was packing to leave (Tuesday). Of course, since y'all were *sleeping* in your bedroom (rather than the living room, where the hospitality suite living room backed up against) and I was really quiet in my bedroom, we didn't really get the sound-proofing test!
Actually one of the weird things we're running into more often, lately, is that campuses may serve truly sub-par food in the "through the line" cafeteria and thus the group may need to "cater" all the meals; when that happens suddenly the college isn't so inexpensive after all, since function space costs money and isn't offset by room nights (which typically happens with a hotel setting).
no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-21 05:36 am (UTC)I did have a couple of really interesting experiences tied in to Tim Powers as GOH and re-reading his novels back-to-back for the conference: first, flying in to Las Vegas and walking by a ringing pay phone and feeling paranoid (shades of Last Call) and second, the first night of the hospitality suite, I went into the bedroom to use the private bathroom (I soooo appreciated the half-bath in the living room portion of the room!) and I could hear the party through the A/C vent above my head - it sounded vaguely underwater-ish and that *also* reminded me of Last Call when Scott meets with "the dead king" in Lake Mead... heh!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-21 05:37 am (UTC)