Originally Posted by 1075guy (Post 1153998)

You could conceivably substitute Toronto (YYZ) for Niagara Falls International Airport (IAG) or Buffalo (BUF).

Both are within a two hour drive of Toronto, and typically YYZ commands a 50% or greater price premium over them. Most pleasure travellers I know steadfastly refuse to fly from Pearson, preferring instead to drive over the border and fly from Buffalo or Niagara. It means you don't have to deal with customs in the airport (the land crossing guards are much easier to deal with) AND its substantially cheaper.

Originally Posted by Siri (Post 1154028)

Thanks for the tip; I retract Thought #4 about Toronto. BUF seemed to have the best prices. (IAG doesn't seem to fly many places?)

This also brought the Vegas average down. Still, pretty high.


Also, I used MCO for Orlando. I think this is reasonable. Should I check Sanford as well? Note that I did use all LA and NYC airports (for some reason Expedia doesn't want to search all of Orlando at once).

Originally Posted by Siri (Post 1153974)

On this topic, I did a little research into airfares to the various cities we've been talking about. (Sorry, didn't get to San Antonio.)

These are the cheapest roundtrip fares (all US$) Expedia is currently offering for Wed-Sun of this year's Championship (April 25-29). Granted, they fluctuate, but from my back-checking they don't seem to change too much to offer a general idea. The columns are (most?) the venue cities mentioned in this thread. The rows are the kinda-sorta most populous FIRST cities/areas based on the EWCP 2012 map, kinda-sorta in order, with some weighting towards checking different geographic areas. My minimum flight distance was 9-10hrs by car (whoops?). I also threw in Honolulu, Tel Aviv (do you guys fly out of TLV?), and Istanbul for reference. The averages are not weighted. If someone has better location data than me trying to slog through a heat map, I'd be happy to weight them.

Initial Thoughts:
1. <3 Chicago
2. Is Vegas inflated for some reason? (e.g. did we hit peak season/spring break for something?)
3. LA, while not geographically central to CONUS, seems quite well-priced. And it's not even the most expensive for our Eurasian continent friends.
4. Toronto is probably having an overly strong affect on price averages for venues out of driving distance. (It's disproportionately expensive for the number of teams there.) This also goes for any possibility of it housing a venue itself--flights are expensive!
5. Denver (listed only as a row) seems to have a lot of cheap flights. No good venues, huh?

Originally Posted by bduddy (Post 1154072)

Is it just me, or did you not include the "driving" cities (not $0, but certainly not as much) into your average? That would certainly skew the real average cost for teams...

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday (Post 1153656)

It is much more expensive for us to fly to St. Louis than to anywhere that's a major air hub. If it was in, say, Detroit or Atlanta, we could probably afford to fly rather than take a 14 hour bus ride.

Originally Posted by Siri (Post 1154090)

I have deliberately omitted these for now because I do not have anything even approaching appropriate guesses. The goal of this chart is to contribute to the numerous "but it's an air travel hub" discussions that have arisen in this thread. (To be honest, I wasn't anticipating just how many "drivable pairs" would show up.) If someone has driving prices, team density numbers, other cities, or anything else, please feel free.

Originally Posted by lemiant (Post 1154160)

If we could get a complete list of team postal codes, or even cities, that would go a long way to making an authoritative chart.

Originally Posted by Taylor (Post 1154253)

How many of these cities are actually actively interested in hosting the Championships? As I recall from the 2010 craziness to host in 2011, the only three serious considerations were Atlanta, Indianapolis, and St. Louis.
I'll have to say STL certainly did it right last year, and they're already promoting it this year. However, and this may be the townie bias in me talking, but if a city can host a Super Bowl, and do it remarkably and unequivocally well, then in my eyes that city would be the frontrunner to host the next round of FIRST Championships.

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery (Post 1153847)

Staples Center is no go due to the NBA and NHL playoffs being in the same time frame as Championship.

Originally Posted by Koko Ed (Post 1153593)

Personally all I want is FIRST to adopt the Battlecry model and have 16 alliances battling all Saturday long (with full individual awards ceremonies afterwards for each division) til the survivors settle it on Einstein in the early evening.

Originally Posted by buildmaster5000 (Post 1153709)

If we are going to throw around location ideas, the DC Convention Center has at least 4 halls, each one with more than enough space to support a 65 team regional. The issue would come, I think, when you have to put 4 or 5 sets of bleachers up at once. And I believe DC has airport hubs for United, US Air, and Delta.

In all honesty, the space we had for the first 2 years of the DC regional could have squeezed close to an entire second regional into, so my guess is that someone, with a lot of planning and measuring, could get 6 regional sized setups in there no problem. But somehow I don't think space is FIRST's biggest concern with the championships...