Author Topic: Chess Tournament: players *must* stay at the hotel.  (Read 3107 times)

warfreak2

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Chess Tournament: players *must* stay at the hotel.
« on: February 22, 2014, 08:16:30 AM »
One of my friends is playing in this:

Quote
All entrants must stay at the hotel. If this cannot be done because the hotel is full, then the team must bring receipts to the BUCA Treasurer at the AGM. The Treasurer will then set a fee that ensures the late-entering team pays no less than £205 for the entry in total, to ensure that a team entering on time gets a better deal than a team entering late. It is essential that as many players stay at the hotel as possible in order to ensure the event’s viability.

It's actually against the rules of the tournament to find somewhere cheaper to stay.

SwordGuy

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Re: Chess Tournament: players *must* stay at the hotel.
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2014, 08:30:12 AM »
Ok, that's a heavy handed way of dealing with a very real problem.

I used to be on the board of directors of an organization that held an annual conference.  Here's how the deal works with hotels.

Meeting rooms in hotels are grossly expensive unless the people meeting there are filling up the hotel.   If the group members rent a specific number of room nights (as per the contract), the meeting rooms are free.

If the organization isn't rolling in dough (and what chess organization is???), each such conference may very well be betting the farm.  If the required number of rooms don't get rented the organization may go broke.

In those situations, late registrants just make everyone's stress levels a hell of a lot higher than necessary.  (Unless the minimums to break even have already been met, in which case the late registration fees are gravy and they'want gobs more of them.))

warfreak2

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Re: Chess Tournament: players *must* stay at the hotel.
« Reply #2 on: February 22, 2014, 08:43:20 AM »
That means the hotel is renting out the meeting room for £0 as a loss leader, expecting to recover the costs from inflated room prices.

I play Go rather than Chess, but Go tournaments tend to pay for meeting rooms at full price, covered by the mandatory entry fees, and make a deal with the hotel to offer rooms to the players at non-inflated (i.e., group discount) prices, as goodwill in exchange for renting out the meeting room. The British Go Association insures tournaments against losses, so in the unlikely event that not enough players enter to cover the room cost (which rarely happens for tournaments that aren't just for a single day), the (volunteer) organisers aren't out of pocket themselves.

Loss leaders often seem to produce these strange results. Why don't businesses just set prices in a way that reflects the costs of providing things?

lentilman

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Re: Chess Tournament: players *must* stay at the hotel.
« Reply #3 on: February 22, 2014, 09:16:56 AM »
Sometimes the event organizers need to get a venue for free, since there is no $$ available to rent something. 

I don't see any problems with this. Sometimes you have to pay to play.

warfreak2

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Re: Chess Tournament: players *must* stay at the hotel.
« Reply #4 on: February 22, 2014, 10:42:37 AM »
The tournament entry fee is £5 (£20 for a team of 4), and it costs at least £33.50 for a share of a hotel room. Supposing the hotel takes £10 per person from the room costs to subsidise the "free" meeting room, then the result is that everyone has to pay at least £38.50 to attend and sleep in a hotel room, without the option to just pay £15 to attend the tournament (£5 for the entry fee, £10 for the meeting room) and not pay £23.50 to sleep in a hotel room. There isn't any economic reason that these two things have to be bundled together, and for the tournaments I go to, they aren't.

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!