[SCA-Dance] Fwd: pennsicdance: The Future of KWDS, part 2

[Mary Railing]

Deonna has been looking at various sites around Saratoga Springs, and she did point out the issue of competing with weddings. She wanted to know whether she should be planning for 2013 or 2014 because if it's the latter, she's still just doing research, but if it's 2013, she needs to start getting firm numbers and start putting together an event bid by the end of this year, so there would be time to go through the kingdom and Society level approval process.

We had a meeting space contract almost two years in advance. They said they didn't normally do that, but they understood the issue of a bid process, so they were willing to guarantee us a cost, provided that we either confirmed that we had the bid by a certain date or cancelled.

--Urraca


________________________________
From: David Learmonth <david.a.learmonth at gmail.com>
To: sca-dance <sca-dance at sca-dance.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2011 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: [SCA-Dance] Fwd: pennsicdance: The Future of KWDS, part 2

Yup, at least that is the experience some of the time.  :)

Part of the trick too with the sites is that we tend to be looking for the
same types of sites as Weddings.  But weddings tend to book rather far in
advance, and also, sites can charge a lot more for weddings than for a
non-profit group like the SCA, so that can sometimes hurt our chances of
getting a site.  (since at least for the recent ones, we've been booking
right in the midst of wedding season).  We had issues trying to sort out one
of our first hopeful potential sites for this reason, which set us back a
little bit anyway.  (it would have been a beautiful site, but we couldn't
get them to commit enough rooms).  It is tricky.  While weddings book really
early, many sites won't even let you book more than 1 year in advance.

But I think that the most recent KWDSes may have come in with a proposed
site.  I'm not sure what their schedules were of getting sites sorted out.
It certainly helps.

Darius