A heads up that due to the resounding number of registrations, the Gaylord is out of rooms at the contract rate for Thursday night. They have some rooms available but they are fairly pricey ($400ish). We have been working over the past few weeks to try and increase the room block and we will continue to ask them to release some rooms, but we are told that the hotel is simply in a sold out situation. We will post an update on the Attendee website later today that lists alternative hotels in the area that can accommodate you Thursday night if you so desire.
We are very happy at the high number of registrations as it means that this will be a fantastic Migration! It looks like it will be the most attended Migration ever which is great news. However, we do want folks to know that we tried to avoid this situation by opening Migration Registration early so that we could gauge attendance and increase our room block while the Gaylord still had availability. We initially booked a block of rooms based on the high end of our past five years attendance. Because we guaranty 80% of those rooms there is real financial risk to the Association if we overbook. When it looked like registrations were going to be on the higher end of the spectrum, we went back to the Gaylord and increased out block. We continued to watch registrations closely and went back over two weeks ago asking for a second block increase but were only to get increased rooms for Friday and Saturday nights.
Again, we will continue to work with the hotel to get rooms released for Thursday night and will keep you posted if rooms become available on Thursday night. We will also continue our work to find alternative locations so please continue to register as we will have alternatives!
Your Migration Planning Team