Wondering about the room party situation? Well here is the skinny from our lovely Hotel Liaison herself:

This is a long explanation but I think this will help everyone understand. TL;DR We want to have room parties and they aren’t axed but it’s going to be easiest if we sell out the hotel, which isn’t the current contract.

For room parties it’s much more complicated this year since we are doing a run of the house contract and not a full buy out contract. What this means is we will have less control of who gets what rooms and what kind of rooms (aside from suites). I’m still working on this, but the best way to make this easiest would be to book out the hotel.

The reason we didn’t do a buy out is if we don’t fill out the hotel, it will be the end of Penguicon because of the high attrition, so we made an initial block off of last year’s numbers. We don’t have any buffer room for Penguicon to be paying for rooms that aren’t filled. For that reason we had to be very cautious with this contract to ensure the longevity of the con. We were very lucky to have the Westin be willing to be so flexible with us.

If we get a LOT of reservations this month and the trend shows we could sell out, the hotel is willing to negotiate a new contract, but it has to be ASAP.

The hotel had offered the idea of using the meeting spaces as room parties. This would make sure we aren’t disturbing other guests if we dont see the hotel booked out. Since we have the meeting rooms 24/7 this wouldn’t require extra rental space or extra cost rent. They were also offering an extremely low corking fee so we could serve our own alcohol. The only caveat would be to make sure the rooms were clean when we were done, which is pretty reasonable.

The idea was to have a few room parties in these meeting spaces, and if the hotel books out and we meet our goals, it could be shifted to actual rooms like we are used to. It seems the community doesn’t like this idea so we will have to pivot to figure out how we can move forward with room parties.

This doesn’t mean room parties are axed, it means we are trying to be adaptable with the limitations of the current contract. Understanding if we will sell out or not will help make those decisions as well.

JZer is the concom room party contact and I will work close with JZer on the next steps. If you have any questions about room parties I would contact JZer at [email protected] or I’m happy to answer any time at [email protected] [Edit: please email [email protected]].

I also recommend anyone who is interested in room parties to join the ConCom meeting on Saturday (there’s a zoom link as well). If you can help us brainstorm how to move forward with our limitations I really want to hear it. We know this is really important and we want to try to do everything we can to make it work.

Request Form

UPDATE: Please fill out this form if you have any kind of special request for your room this year at Penguicon. Want to be on a quiet floor, need a roll out bed, want to throw a room party? This is your form!