I’m not aware of anything, in particular, happening in Prague that weekend that would explain the hotels in the downtown area being full. Prague is a very popular city that is coming back from two bad winters with COVID so it seems that people are simply eager to visit.
We did put together a guide on public transportation so people are comfortable booking outside of the city center and also had a couchsurfing table for people to advertise and look for spare accommodation.
We decided to do the conference in the city center because we think it is a beautiful area that we wanted to share with our attendees. There seems to be an existing tension in the community on whether to do conferences in large convention centers at an arbitrary location or in unique spaces which are an inherent part of the conference experience.
We were considering doing a group order for accommodation to help out the attendees but we did not have enough capacity on the team to do it. I’ve done this for another conference in the past and it is A LOT of work to assign people, deal with changes, communicate with the hotel etc.
So this is sort of sad or darker in tone, but one consideration is the Ukraine refugees. Theres ~5.7M, which is large fraction of the population of neighboring countries.
While looking for hotels, you can notice many hotels with a notice offering free stays for refugees. My sense this is a strong, genuine offer and a lot of capacity was used.
So that would use a lot of rooms, in addition to being demand surging after being capped by COVID.
(Yes, I have thought about the elasticity and other indirect effects for refugees by booking or going to Prague—this effect is probably tiny or nil.)
Yeah, I confirmed directly that the refugees weren’t what was driving the Prague problem (though maybe on the margin it helps to make it so bad), since last weekend and the weekend following the conference had normal Eastern European prices.
What do you think about adding a field in the application form, like: “I’d like to share a room with other EAG attendees”. Then you can just lump together people who checked it into some email group, and let them coordinate among themselves.
I’m not aware of anything, in particular, happening in Prague that weekend that would explain the hotels in the downtown area being full. Prague is a very popular city that is coming back from two bad winters with COVID so it seems that people are simply eager to visit.
We did put together a guide on public transportation so people are comfortable booking outside of the city center and also had a couchsurfing table for people to advertise and look for spare accommodation.
We decided to do the conference in the city center because we think it is a beautiful area that we wanted to share with our attendees. There seems to be an existing tension in the community on whether to do conferences in large convention centers at an arbitrary location or in unique spaces which are an inherent part of the conference experience.
We were considering doing a group order for accommodation to help out the attendees but we did not have enough capacity on the team to do it. I’ve done this for another conference in the past and it is A LOT of work to assign people, deal with changes, communicate with the hotel etc.
So this is sort of sad or darker in tone, but one consideration is the Ukraine refugees. Theres ~5.7M, which is large fraction of the population of neighboring countries.
While looking for hotels, you can notice many hotels with a notice offering free stays for refugees. My sense this is a strong, genuine offer and a lot of capacity was used.
So that would use a lot of rooms, in addition to being demand surging after being capped by COVID.
(Yes, I have thought about the elasticity and other indirect effects for refugees by booking or going to Prague—this effect is probably tiny or nil.)
Yeah, I confirmed directly that the refugees weren’t what was driving the Prague problem (though maybe on the margin it helps to make it so bad), since last weekend and the weekend following the conference had normal Eastern European prices.
What do you think about adding a field in the application form, like: “I’d like to share a room with other EAG attendees”. Then you can just lump together people who checked it into some email group, and let them coordinate among themselves.
Filip, that sounds reasonable too . Thanks for the add .