>Tamar:
>
>Just the voice I wanted to hear from from a historical perspective. As far as the Advisor DevCon's go, and now the Connections DevCon, do they not realize there are resort areas in the northern part of the US? Selecting southern cities in the summer? I would like to go to San Diego, Phoenix, Orlando in December. Send me to Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Boston in the summer. Do you really want to paln a major event in Miami in September at the height of the hurricane and summer seasons? Remember our summer usually lasts from April to October and Miami does not really experience winter. :)
>
>At the very least, explore other States.
>

Fair comments, but I think if you take a look, the pattern you'll see in general, is that at least with the Advisor conferences (I have no special in to the Connections people), we tend to go wherever it is in the off-season because we can get discounts. While many here find that the room rates are higher than they'd like to pay, they're still substantially discounted from what you'd pay in the height of the season at those locations.

As an experiment, I just checked the Fountainebleau's rates for the DevCon time and for the following January. For DevCon, using Hilton's site, I was quoted rates from $189 to $209 for a room for 2 adults in September. For January, the same room ran $319 to $339. That's why Miami in September and Palm Springs in June.

At least right now, Advisor does have different considerations than Connections. There are a limited number of hotel conference facilities that can handle a conference the size of DevCon. And, as we learned in New Orleans, not all of them handle it well. <s>

Please don't misunderstand me. I'd love to visit some other cities. OTOH, the reality of going to a conference for me is that I rarely leave the hotel. WhilFest being in Milwaukee in November is NBD because I'm not going to see the city anyway. I've been to San Diego 3 or 4 times and been touring once. Same for Seattle (except that Microsoft almost always includes some kind of party on a boat <g>). The NOLA conference was a huge exception to this rule and, to some extent, made it less valuable as a conference.

Tamar