Originally written by phi

Generally speaking this year's hotel liaison went well, with a few problems.

We assign a room number to every reservation in the hotel. That lets us do some amazing things (such as have a quiet block at all in a hotel all of whose floors have parties and rooms facing the atrium) but it is a lot of work. I did not delegate this work as well as I might have. The job mostly doesn't have to interact with the rest of hotel and could be split off more thoroughly than it was this year. A tool that could insert data into Passkey wholesale instead of one record at a time would be a great help here.

Our approach to blocking this year was much more correct than last year's. It will need only a few tweaks for next year.

Getting all of the dealers reservation info at once after it was all ready meant a big rush to get it into the computer before the rooming list deadline. Better to make the dealers make ordinary hotel reservations (for Sunday night only if the hotel has otherwise sold out already) and send us the confirmation numbers to be transformed into correct reservations, even if exact placement is not known. Having partial placement, furniture removal, and extras requests as they came in instead of waiting to get it all at once would also have been helpful; if we had 80% of that info six weeks ahead instead of three we could figure out places to put the extra furniture and not have it all wind up in the third floor freight elevator lobby where it prevented dealers from being able to load in and out. In support of this, the furniture list removal spreadsheet should have a column for each item in the room, instead of just a text description of what to
do.

My party czar went completely dark and I did not replace him when I should have. Getting parties into spots where they wouldn't bother anyone was no problem, though one party host who assured me his would be an open party proceeded to throw a party that was not really appropriate for the second-floor location I gave him.

If we had had an actual party czar we could have tried to attract publishers with free space (BU Lounge went mostly unused in the evenings); let party hosts know that furniture removal from the hotel was an option instead of having them move furniture themselves; had communications with the newsletter at less of the last minute; been clearer about our party policies, saving ops some headaches at runtime; and coordinated ice deliveries and party seed ahead of time.

Too many of the hotel deliverables happen simultaneously. There are good reasons why the documents are due at the hotel when they are but we need either more people working on hotel or some way of identifying more things that can be fixed ahead of time. There's plenty that can't as program and events both depend on participant schedules that change through no fault of the participants up to a few weeks out, and the rooming list will need to be adjusted for cancellations and the like. As time goes on and the year-to-year changes get smaller this problem will dissipate, but it won't disappear. The first week of January was Not Fun.

Through the fall, Hotel was running about two weeks behind schedule. By December this had improved to a week and a half; at the beginning of January if was four days and by Sunday before the con we were caught up. This was better than the six weeks behind schedule we ran last year. And being caught up by con meant I didn't have to spend hours in the back of the house fixing things that should have happened ahead of time. But running ahead of schedule would have been better. Experience this year shows that the schedule in the master timeline is correct, if slightly incomplete.

There should be a person on the hotel staff to check all the room turns and such to make sure they are performed correctly. I did not have such a person; in the end Samantha Dings did all the work since she was in charge of most of the things that needed it, and I'd like to thank her for stepping in (and tipping the housemen at 5:30 in the
morning). Apart from monitoring room turns Hotel does not need to have anyone on duty between 3am and 9am. If we did not have someone to check the room turns as they happened it would have been moderately OK to have a duty staffer check the state of each room at 7am instead, but having Samantha there in real time made that totally unnecessary. This did mean that some morning cleanings got dropped, though.

Since the pre-con work really was all complete pre-con, and since at-con issues were resolved quickly, shift handover went easily most of the time, and at-con staff need not be the same people as pre-con staff next year. Having Steve take shifts worked well even though he had not been following along on the email and next year if some staffers want to skip being on the hotel@ alias that would be fine.

For the most part Ops staffers were careful with the hotel Nextel. But if we have to choose it's more important for the on duty chair to have a Nextel than for Ops to have one.

The hotel tells me they were 100% full both nights. One guest with a reservation for just Saturday night could not be accommodated due to mundane overstays; there is little the hotel can do about this besides comp them a stay somewhere else (which they did).

You've all heard about the elevators. I expected worse. Having six functional elevators at noon on Monday was huge. I'll certainly be providing feedback for the hotel about people getting hit by the doors.

All in all I thought housing went way more smoothly than last year, but the Program of Events was rougher around the edges.

Next week I will be buying gift baskets for ten or so hotel employees who went above and beyond. If you have suggestions for who deserves these please let me know by email or at the debrief.

More of my thoughts are at http://conrunner.net/wiki/index.php?title=Hotel_Liaison where I am in the process of writing a comprehensive guide to being hotel liaison,
similar to http://www.tcne.net/~phi/shoestring.html for treasury.