Airfare Breakdown

[digitaldiscipline]

Okay, so we looked at the hotels we had in mind for the Convergence bid this evening.  Hooray for CorpGothness, since both contact people at the venues were impressed and surprised that I sound like a coherent, clueful adult, even after they found out it's a net.goth event, and we knocked their socks off.  That's a post for another day (ie: tomorrow).

I also did some airfare comparisons, apples-to-apples, for the C11 bids, using an imperfect but consistent tool (sidestep.com):

From NYC Boston Chicago Detroit DC Baltimore Buffalo Denver San Diego/Tampa San Francisco Seattle Dallas New Orleans Atlanta Miami Phoenix Toronto London (UK) Los Angeles Charlotte Minneapolis St. Louis Indianapolis Columbus Houston

To Tampa 5/27-5/30 $142 $157 $184 $228 $184 $192 $230 $290 ($235 to Sarasota) $329 $246 $286 $276 $193 $184 $122 $195 $316 $750 $268 $224 $303 $314 $155 $224 $253 ($198 to Sarasota)

To San Diego 4/22-4/25 $230 $391 $261 $342 $305 $239 $349 $242 $323 $154 $238 $301 $241 $350 $351 $124 $333 $580 $244 $508 $223 $351 $297 $288 $234

Comments

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I included a handful of drive-probables for each (LA & Phoenix(?) for SD; Miami and possibly NO & Atlanta for Tampa), so that if people go cross-country vs. driving locally, at least there wasn't a hole in the table.

If SWA had an easier way to look at fares for flights so far in advance (I tried, and had to give up when March was about the extent of it's usefulness), I'd have included those figures. SWA is the only frequent-flyer program I belong to, by way of illustration. They're just not choosing to play nice with the airfare search engines (or at least the ones I tend to use); including them would have made a two-hour off-the-cuff research project twice as long.

Definitely just a baseline comparison, but I think it does illustrate that, for the majority of folks looking to attend, it's less expensive to get to Tampa than SD, and even those times when it isn't, the price break of staying on the west coast isn't as substantial as maybe many people think.