Request for a Seattle Forum
 

Questions about Seattle account for approximately 1/4th of the current threads in the West forum.


Last week 2 out of 8 threads
Last month 6 out of 22 threads
Last 2 months 9 (10 if you count the PDX/SEA thread) out of 38

This count does not include the Seattle Visitors guide sticky at the top of the page, but does include one large consolidated SEA Parking thread.


The second most talked about destination would be Colorado ... mostly Denver, with 6 out of 38 over the last 2 months.

There's a decent amount of threads - but not a whole heck of a lot - and the threads that are there seem to be mostly (with the exception of a few larger ones), 4-5 post threads, so not a lot of involvement.

Does this mean that a Seattle forum will be mostly a Q/A forum without much discussion and without many people responding? Maybe.

I'm totally open to it - but need to be slightly more convinced.

I'll do a little more research myself over the next week or so.

Happy New Year, missy! :)

There would be an expansion of questions and discussions to a dedicated Seattle forum if it was recognized that Seattle serves as a Northwest transportation gateway to those in Washington, British Columbia and, of course, the residents of Alaska.

Questions and discussions surrounding air travel can generally be answered through the various airline forums (most notably Alaska Air), but other ground and sea travel questions are a little trickier.

A Seattle forum would benefit those with questions about driving from Vancouver to SEA (or BLI) to board flights & save over paying higher Canadian airfares, taxes & fees. Also Victoria Clipper questions (high-speed passenger only ferry between Seattle & Victoria) as well as cruise related travel info (Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver are all big players in the cruise industry).

One example: When Disney started doing Alaska cruises out of Vancouver, apparently those back east did not know that Alaska Air has several flights daily between SEA and YVR! TA's were booking their clients to SEA by air and then were advising their clients to take the train or rent a car between SEA and YVR! :eek: - a journey equal to the amount of time it took some of them to fly to Seattle! (Thank goodness Disney has since changed their Alaskan cruises to depart from Seattle).

I could give other examples, but yes, I give missydarlin's suggestion of a dedicated Seattle forum a big ^

A brilliant idea. ^

I dunno. If if it had not been for Sleepless in Seattle and Frasier, I never would have heard of the city.

Shouldn't we wait until a geographical location is the site of at least 10 successful movies or TV series before giving it its own forum?

Would that include movies and tv series shot in whole or in part in Vancouver?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...t_in_Vancouver
or Victoria?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...itish_Columbia

The key to this issue is not where the films are shot but where the story takes place.

The King and I remains a Thai (or at least Siamese) film even if it was shot entirely in Hollywood.

This afternoon, in the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago de Chile, I saw a guy wearing a "Seattle Central Business District" t-shirt. I'm pretty sure this guy had not much if any idea what his shirt meant. But that isn't the point. Should he ever want to explore the meaning of his attire, and should FT have a Seattle forum at the time (and should he have happened to learn English in the meantime, or at least use a good translation site), he might actually want to visit Seattle.

This, I fear, is the strongest argument I currently have for a Seattle forum, but it is timely, and really points to how someone doing a web search for Seattle travel might me a lot more likely to find it on FT with a Seattle forum than without.

The previous post caused a "learn English" school (based in Santiago) banner ad to pop up :D

I support the creation of a Seattle Forum.

Officer and a Gentleman was also shot in the area! Sooooo +1 for the forum!!!

I love Seattle dearly, I am very familiar with the city, and I may even live there someday, but I don't know. 10 threads in the last half year? That seems a recipe for a dead forum.

Seattle has a very good, very appropriate, very logical home in the West forum. Back when I had more time each day to devote to FlyerTalk, the West forum was one of my regular destinations. In all that time, I never once felt that discussion of Seattle was unreasonably heavy in that forum or that discussion of Seattle would fit better elsewhere. It's not like Texas, where there's doubt about which region it feats neatly in. Seattle is definitely a part of the West.

I'm open to arguments to the contrary, but this wouldn't have been a change I would have suggested, and I'm not sure I see the benefit this change would have.

What Seattle has (IMnshO) that many other places don´t is what I perceive to be a disproportionate (good thing) number of active FTers in relation to its population, etc. It also seems to have regular FT gatherings, perhaps more than many other places of its size. Destination forums sometimes are a good place for at least notices of community events. I know that airline forums also have been used from time to time for this.

While my perception may be currently clouded by some of the tasty beverage offerings here in the Salon VIP Neruda @SCL :o, I don´t think that it is :D

As far as a "recipe for a dead forum," you can´t have a recipe if you don´t have a cookbook. The recipes that aren´t in the cookbook get lost and often never used again. Seattle deserves its own cookbook.

Fin

One thing I thought about when voting to approve the Texas forum was would there be a run of requests for an "XXX city/state forum" and not that it is a bad thing at all :) but in this case, would it phud for thought to perhaps make it a Seattle & Vancouver forum? Yes there is a Canada Forum (with a sub forum of Toronto) but with these 2 cities being close neighbors and all. Just a thought (and to muddy the waters even more, Portland, Oregon is not that far away either). I dunno, maybe a "Great Northwest" forum?

Not sure that's a very helpful criterion. Or maybe that was an attempt at a joke? :confused:

Very good point. ^

Concur