Originally Posted by
omahajim
Often it's because we don't have much choice when it comes to our needs for facility size. As you have probably seen, general and breakout sessions, along with trade show/expo needs, require tremendous amounts of space. Our event there this month will be 4000+ people, and site selection is taken very seriously by our company. But many many other factors come in to play when selecting where to hold our events, chief among them availability of suitable meeting space on the dates we need.
We always have blocks at many different hotels, so our attendees have a choice, just like the one you made.
Omahajim: Thanks for your feedback. While I fully understand that hotel properties large enough to host really large meetings are limited in number, most probably a rather small percentage of meetings compare in size to yours. My ex-wife once had her firm's annual meeting at the Opryland, and she more than once lamented about the difficulty her firm had finding hotels large enough host their meeting. But with 2,800+ rooms, the Opryland is a very unique hotel (at least anywhere east of Las Vegas), capable of hosting several such large meetings at any one time.
My questioning "why" meetings are set up at hotels like this, which charge non-standard fees and add-ons, was more geared toward smaller meetings such as mine, which will porbably have less than 100 attendees. Such meetings can certainly be scheduled to convene at virtually any 3* hotel, in any city. Let me also add that my office and those of the other attendees have rather limited travel budgets to support such travel.