I wanted to take a little time on a Friday and explain Blur’s registration page, so as to clear up any confusion.
If you head to the registration page, you’ll find a bunch of “packages.” The baseline package is the “full conference pass.” This includes food, beverages, coffee, wifi, open bar at night — all of the stuff you’d expect from a non-expo type of event (i.e., you show up and you’re taken care of). Once you move above that baseline, you’ll see three different package options: one with one night hotel included, one with two nights of hotel included and one with three nights of hotel included. As you move “up” the packages (add more hotel room nights), the discount you’re effectively receiving on those hotel room nights increase — until we hit a 60% discount for a 3-night stay.
All of this (which isn’t typical for a tech conference) begs the question: Why are they doing this?
Most non-conference organizers don’t realize that maybe the largest single financial commitment a conference makes when it starts up is called its “room block.” This is the number of rooms that we commit to buying, whether they’re booked or not, in order to secure the space at the hotel over a number of days. It’s an unavoidable term if you want to be in a hotel (there’s also a required food and beverage commitment, but that’s another story).
The Omni at Champions Gate is an *extremely* nice hotel (5-star), and suits our needs very nicely for Blur (i.e,, it sets the level of service that we want for our attendees). But, of course, we realize that a lot of startups and price-sensitive folks might find the room rates to be a bit steep. The *problem* is that there aren’t really any good options that are close to the Omni – so if you end up staying elsewhere, you spend so much on cabs, that…well, you get the point.
What we’re trying to do here is off-load the cost of those rooms on to our backs to encourage everyone to stay at the Omni. So, if you look at it — the 3 night package, for example, essentially takes your effective “cost of a hotel room” down to as cheap or cheaper than you can find at *any* other hotel in Orlando (not just a comparable one). And, we’re happy to do that because it helps us make our room block AND provides a better conference experience because everyone is in a central location.
Bottom-line: it’s a win-win.
So, don’t think we’re running some weird scam – we’re not. We’re literally trying to provide our attendees with a price that gets them in as cheaply as possible to where everyone is staying, while still meeting our commitments so that we can keep growing Blur on a year over year basis.
How it works: you register for the package you want, we’ll contact you via email and get you booked into our “master block” of rooms. When you show up, you’ll only need a credit card for any incidentals you rack up in the room. Clean, simple, easy.
I hope you’ll join us.
