As you can imagine, hosting an Annual Convention for 4,000 attendees in any city comes with its challenges both logistically and financially. In order for a host city to even consider giving us the space we need in a large hotel or convention center, we must agree to provide them with a proportionate amount of hotel room night revenue. Basically, in order to reserve enough space for the convention, we have to commit to use thousands of hotel room nights at contracted hotels. If we fail to use those rooms, CEC is fined. Those fines can reach upwards of $30k each year.
When you stay in the official hotel block you are staying at a hotel property that has been personally inspected and vetted by CEC staff for appropriate and adequate levels of quality of accessibility, accommodations, level of service, and safety and security. Additionally, for each night our guests stay in official contracted CEC Hotels, the hotels agree to pay CEC a small rebate. These rebates add up to thousands of dollars and are used to pay for meeting space rental fees. Removing this rebate means an increased price to hold the convention, which translates into steep registration price increases for attendees.
If convention attendees book outside the Official CEC Hotel Block, they are hindering our ability to meet the minimums required by our contracts, putting us in jeopardy of strict fines and also depriving CEC of the hotel rebates needed to offset convention expenses to keep registration costs low.
While we can understand the immediate attractiveness of an online deal for accommodations outside of the block, CEC would like attendees to understand the long term repercussions to the future of the Annual Convention caused by choosing to not to stay within the block. Failing to meet room block commitments will mean increased registration prices for attendees in the future, and could mean cities will be unwilling to work with us to host our convention in years to come.