Since every coin has two sides I shall now flip this one and post one of the fails. We had planned and advertised two and then three meals for Geekonomicon #1. All three were cancelled at the last minute for different reasons. We sent out emails to the email addresses that were on the payments, to let those who had purchased VIP memberships or the meals separately, to notify them of what had happened and offer either a refund of the amount of their membership that had been applied to the meals or an exchange of equal value in items like shirts or photo ops etc at the door. Unfortunately we did not really receive any replies to this message and saw few who approached us at registration for their exchange. We still want to talk to these people and offer them compensation since it is owed them and we will always make a point of being honest which is also why I am going to tell you basically what happened and what we plan to do this year to prevent this happening again. If you are one of these people and you are reading this please contact us at geekonomicon.whynot@gmail so we can rectify this and keep you happy. We had a Cthulhu by Gaslight Mystery Dinner planned for Friday night at the venue. We had given the caters the budget we could afford. Unfortunately when it came time to pay the deposit to them we found that the cost they gave us was way beyond our budget and we simply did not have the available funds to do it as we were going by our budget strictly. This was also the case with the Geekmass feast with the guests.They had planned out great meals but but at to high a cost and we just did not find out in time about the difference until it was to late to do anything about it. We immediately scrambled and found a local restaurant called Sophies that was not far from the venue and was willing to at the last minuet host an even better meal for the mystery dinner. Unfortunately when the theater group was notified of the last minute changes and the small number of meal tickets that had already been sold they decided that they could not take a financial risk of coming and canceled. You see they were relying on a percentage of the ticket sales to cover their costs of coming all the way from Florida and could not afford the trip if there was a chance that people may not buy the tickets at the door because it was no longer at the venue itself. Sophies was kind enough to still give our attendees a 5% discount on their food if they came in with a badge from the con. The Saturday Geekmass feast we had figured out a way to have it in the large hospitality suite that the Quality Inn had given us but were stymied again when we could not find a caterer capable of doing it on such short notice during the holiday season. So we did try but failed to save those two meals. We were also going to have a tea party on Sunday at 4PM in the Edgewater Inn Ballroom. Luckily we had not sold any tickets to that so no one had to be reimbursed. When our initial catering plan failed we had decided that since several of us owners used to work in catering and knew how to cook for and host it we would simply do it ourselves. Unfortunately since we were not able to get a licence to do so in time we had to also cancel that one. Many lessons were learned on this front. We will be having a meeting to discuss options for avoiding these difficulties this year. We have so far looked at two possible options and would like to hear your opinions. One is that we could move to a different part of the convention center property where catering from outside sources may be allowed, and the other is going ahead and making arrangements with local restaurants to have the meals with them off site. Some driving may be required but it would be easier to create atmosphere and by doing it this way we would be contributing even more to the local economy. We are open to other suggestions as well. What say you?
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 03:48:58 +0000
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