We can only secure hotel room blocks as large as our history justifies at the time of contract signing. We monitor the conference growth each year, and work with future conference sites to secure more rooms whenever possible. There are very few hotel properties that are large enough to actually provide a room block large enough to accommodate all of our registrants. Some of our members may also not be aware that hotels are not willing to provide us with access to their entire inventory of rooms. We are not suffering from discrimination.
Hotels don t provide their entire inventory to any single group.
In looking at potential sites for 2006,we are actually negotiating with properties for blocks in the range of 1,200 to 1,400 rooms. As you can surmise, if we limit ourselves to such properties, our choice of cities and of hotels will become increasingly smaller. Whenever the overflow hotels are not within walking distance of the conference hotel, SIOP will provide bus transportation, which was done in New Orleans. The obvious reason that this is a problem is that it artificially fills the hotel room block and precludes registrants from being able to get a room. The exact amount of the client s liability depends upon how much below the room block actual room usage falls.