SSSA’s ability to negotiate low room rates depends almost entirely upon the association’s ability to guarantee to the hotel that a certain number of people will stay at the conference hotel. You are therefore strongly urged to stay at the Riviera. Convention attendees choosing not to stay in the Riviera will incur a $30 surcharge on their conference registration. The Riviera is providing the association with a list of people staying at the hotel in the SSSA room block, and this list will be the surcharge reference document.
- Exceptions to the surcharge will be made for (1) attendees living within 50 miles of Las Vegas, and (2) attendees associated with high schools, colleges, universities, companies, or agencies located within 50 miles of Las Vegas.
Why the new policy?
This new policy is being implemented because, over the years, SSSA has run a greater and greater risk of not fulfilling our agreements with our conference hotels regarding the number of room nights our conference attendees use during the conference. This occurs because people have increasingly sought out alternative accommodations for their stays in the conference cities. While the leadership of SSSA understands the financial reasons for doing this, there are very negative effects for the association.
First, we are able to successfully negotiate free meeting space from our convention hotels because the hotels believe they will make a certain amount of money from our attendees’ hotel stays, based on our estimates of conference attendance. The association’s contracts with the hotels, however, state that if the conference does not meet the room block minimum to which we have agreed, then the hotel can charge SSSA (1) for the unused room block balance, usually at the conference room night rate, and (2) for our use of the meeting spaces used by panels, receptions, etc., with charges estimated to begin at $10,000-$30,000. (If you have ever rented a hotel ballroom for a wedding reception, for example, you know how expensive that can cost; multiply that by five ballrooms for three full days, and you’ll begin to grasp the scale of the fees involved.) In Albuquerque, for example, we only exceeded our negotiated room block by two room nights; that means if one other person stayed three nights in another hotel than the conference hotel, the hotel would have been within its contractual rights to levy potentially huge charges against SSSA.
Second, our ability to obtain free meeting space from the convention hotels permits SSSA to keep convention registration and membership fees relatively low. Even though SSSA has in reserve sufficient funds to cover these levels of additional expenses for a couple of years, beyond that the charges would bankrupt the association. In order to avoid that, we would have to significantly raise conference registration and membership fees, which, in turn, could plausibly reduce attendance and membership.
Third, our ability to meet the terms of our current hotel contracts (in terms of enough attendees staying in enough conference hotel rooms) directly affects our ability to negotiate favorable room rates and inexpensive (or free) meeting space with other hotels for future conferences. If we fail to meet our contracted number of room stays, the hotel industry would become significantly less accommodating to us.
Thus, the SSSA Executive Council approved in 2006 the policy of a conference registration surcharge for attendees electing not to stay in our convention hotels. This is becoming an increasingly common practice in academic associations, though we took this step being very conscious of the conflict in which it may place attendees. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation as we move forward.