Over at Con-news.com Petrea Mitchell explains the economics of convention centers and makes some very interesting points about how Dragon*Con keeps down costs at the expense of making program harder to attend (and probably effectively segregating different sub-groups of attendees). One of the reasons that Worldcon is expensive is that it has a commitment to keeping as much as possible under one roof. It also has a commitment to trying to avoid queues, which is something that comes back to bite us on a regular basis.
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Otakon (largest anime con in the east coast) is in a convention center and has lines everywhere. It is also 26,000 people big (one person equals one member). The Anime crowd has a reasonable expectation to spend an hour or so before a concert in line, also. The Masquearde is in a nearby arena (has no lines) because there is no hall configuration with decent sitelines that can hold that many people. Convention Centers can be a mixed blessing.
I am surprised that DragonCon hasn’t been forced by Atlanta’s city fathers to go to the Convention Center. I hear that Dragoncon pushes the safe capacity of the four hotels.
Reading the constitution, I don’t seem to find the word “commitment” anywhere.
Anticipation could have been almost lost in its convention center, heck the dealers room and art show were shockingly small, and IF i make it to Australia (doubt it), I hate to see what a 1500~2000 person con will look like in a con center.
Maybe we do need to downsize a bit, just so we can grow again?
If a worldcon was to have all of the programming in one hotel, and the dealers room/art show/big events in another, would I still go??
Sure.
WIll people complain?
Sure.
But I’m tending to think some very near future worldcon WILL need to do this.
Tom K:
You are right, there’s nothing in the constitution about facilities. But if you were to try bidding for a site where the programming was spread all about town you’d very quickly find out how seriously the regular site selection voters take the need to not have to walk far.
Or you could look at all the complaints about Montreal because the main con hotel, where all the evening parties took place, was a whole 10 minutes away from the convention center.
Of course with the right collection of hotels, conveniently situated, it might be possible. And very soon now we’ll probably be back in Chicago, which can do it. But one of the advantages that Dragon*Con has is that because it never moves few people will ever say “we should go somewhere else next year.”
Tom S:
D*C couldn’t have gone to the convention center this year because there was a pilots’ convention there that weekend. And if it ever did move to the convention center, that’s a big chunk of budget they can’t use to pay appearance fees for headline-making media stars. (Given how far D*C has diversified at this point, it might not mean a huge drop in attendance; it would be interesting to see what happened if they ever decided to make the transition.)
It’s worth noting that Dragon*Con has, in the past made use of convention center-type facilities (and that it has, in the past, moved around several times): In the mid-1990s, when the convention was based in the Hilton, the masquerade was held at the Atlanta Civic Center, a couple blocks away and across I-75/85 via footbridge; and for several years after the convention left the Hilton, it was housed in the Inforum/Apparel Mart/Merchandise Mart convention complex, two or three blocks west of the Hyatt Regency.
It was only in the early 2000s that it finally moved back to being entirely hotel-based, with the Hyatt Regency and adjacent Marriott Marquis hosting it until it spread back into the Hilton (which was to the east of and adjacent to the Marriott). And finally, in the last two years, as its attendance has approached 40,000, it has spread into a fourth major hotel, the Sheraton Atlanta, which is, unfortunately, not adjacent to the three other hotels; it is two blocks south of the Hilton.
As long as the convention was based in the Hyatt (interestingly, Atlanta’s only major unionized hotel) and the Marriott (and, later, the Hyatt, Marriott and Hilton), it was easy to get back and forth to everything, and each hotel had plenty of large venue space for major events (the Centennial Ballroom at the Hyatt, for instance, when fully opened, could probably seat the entire membership of a mid-sized Worldcon). IMHO, the Sheraton made an awkward addition this year, with some program tracks moved down there when they perhaps should have been in one of the other hotels instead.
I suspect that it will take Dragon*Con another year or two to best work out how to integrate the Sheraton and its program space into the convention; the same thing happened when they finally moved back to being hotel-based earlier this decade, and again when they returned to the Hilton several years after that.
Of course, by the time they do work out how to best arrange the convention over four hotels instead of three, the membership may start pushing 50,000, and they might have to consider adding yet another venue; perhaps the Westin Peachtree, which isn’t even as close as the Sheraton, and is to the south-west of the core hotels. Alternately, they may decide to, once again, move the dealer’s room and art show into the Apparel Mart complex. Neither option seems particularly good to me at the moment.