I want to share what I learned when I booked the hotel for the conference in Sweden. The conference website showed that most of the hotels were already booked on the Saturday night, the final night of the conference, which will make for some tricky moving on that day. However, I found that I was able to book one of the hotels, Hotel Gothia Towers, for the five nights (I want to attend a pre-conference and need to stay Saturday night to fly back to New York on Sunday) directly through the hotel, not the conference booking service, for much less than the conference booking service was offering. I am mentioning this since there may be better deals to be had booking directly, rather than through the package rate. Granted, I booked an economy room instead of the standard room, but it is just me and I do not expect to use the hotel much during the stay. Not sure if there were any advantages using the conference booking service or not, but it appears it is just for the hotel. Hope some people may find this useful. ----- Jeffrey Keefer j.keefer@lancaster.ac.uk Blog: http://silenceandvoice.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/JeffreyKeefer Website: http://www.jeffreykeefer.com -----Original Message----- From: Matthew Allen [mailto:M.Allen@exchange.curtin.edu.au] Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2010 8:25 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Registration for Internet Research 11.0: Sustainability, Participation, Action, Gothenburg, Sweden, October 21-23, 2010 now open Dear all I appreciate the concern some, or even many, of us have about the fee level. I wanted to add two things to the debate: first, as someone who has spent his entire academic life flying from the furthest reaches of the southern hemisphere to Europe and the UK, I have always felt that the airfare and hotel costs are far more of an issue than the conference fee cost. For example, for me to come to Sweden would cost in the order of USD$2500 for airfare and hotel. So, what the conference costs probably doesn't matter to me since the differernce between a low or high fee is going to be no more than $200 and thus less than 10% of the overall cost. second, local situations are always different and significantly affect prices. I have no idea what they are in Sweden (though suspect the tax rate throughout the country might have an effect), but in Brisbane, for example, the way that the hotel we held the conference at funded its venue hire meant some extra costs, but at the advantage of not having to sell a set number of hotel rooms (more cost, less risk). Of course, it could also be argued that holding the conference in Sweden is going to help a lot of northern European grad students and less well funded academics attend than if, say, it was held in the USA. This certainly was the reason that the conference was held in Brisbane a few years ago. It's a tricky issue. Dr Matthew Allen Associate Professor and Head of Department, Internet Studies School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts Curtin University of Technology, CRICOS 00301J Australia m.allen@curtin.edu.au http://netcrit.net <http://netcrit.net/> @netcrit +61 8 92663511 (v) +61 8 9266 3166 (f) Australian Learning and Teaching Council Fellow _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/