Joe i have to disagree with you disney makes a fortune off of first

The $4000 event registration fee goes to FIRST, partially to cover the expenses that FIRST has to pay to Disney, but also to help cover the cost of the kit and FIRST's operating expenses for the year. Keep in mind that FIRST is a non-profit organization.
If you look at the prices at the Disney concession at the event site compared to the rest of the parks, the prices are comparable. Disney is actually doing a service to us by not forcing us to travel into the parks for meals, but rather bringing a meal option to us.

The reference to transportation being part of the $75 event fee is for those teams who book outside of the FIRST/Disney package, but stay at a hotel where a package is offered. Keep in mind that not all FIRST/Disney package hotels are on Disney property. Therefore, there is a special FIRST bus running to the event site, and there is no way to distinguish between a team who bought inside the package and one who bought outside of it, therefore Disney is forced to assume(sometimes incorrectly, I'll admit) that these teams are using the transportation.

Joe's main point, which I happen to agree with him on, is not saying that Disney does not make money off of FIRST. Rather, he is saying that when compared to an average tourist visiting Disney, they do not make as much off of FIRST participants. As he mentions, due to our time spent in the event village, we have little, if any time to visit the parks, which means we are not feeding money into the gift shops and other additional expenses that we would otherwise spend on if all of our time was spent in the parks. Also, Disney has to put more money into our visit than they do for their average visitor. The event site(the figure they always give about the carpeting being enough to carpet X homes sticks in my head as one example., and after the abuse I've seen it take, I imagine large parts of it, if not all of it, have to be replaced every year), the extra busses to the hotels directly to the event site, the displaced Disney employees helping out at the event site rather than their usual position, the fireworks and other pyrotechnics at closing ceremonies, the DJ, food, and staff to manage the wrap party,... I could go on for quite a while, but I think the point is made. Does Disney make some money off of us? Definitely...is it nearly as much as they would make if we were all going there for vacation? I think not.

Nate i used to work for disney they are not loseing a dime trust me. And if disney could not make money on the conessions they would not be there, you can take that to the bank. Ex:disney chrages 3.00 dollars for a large coke it costs them .05 cents because coke does not charge them for syrup or cups. And your right you pay 4000 for the kit how ever at nationals that is the 2nd you are paying that price. I also do not get the bus thing you are talking about unless a team walks into wdw property to get a bus, how to you think they are going to get on the property. They going to have to take there own bus to epcot.

Hey we have an Awesome facility right here in the Motor city to host the Championship, and I think the City of Pontiac would be thrilled to let us pay $4000 per team to use this former pig skin astro turf white elephant! :D

Okay this is not an arguement.
I just need to know the link on the FIRST website where it talks about the $75 ok. Thats it no arguement.

Hey guys FIRST has to pay for employees all year round. Thats where alot of money goes.

Bottom Line
 

I think the last figure I heard for the bottom line was 3.5 Million Dollars that Disney spends to support this event. With the hard times some of these industries have expereinced, why shouldn't they try to reduce their cost to support this event. Although I certainly understand your thinking on this, I don't think that Disney is being unreasonable in asking us to support just a little more of the actual cost of this event. Hats off to your team for taking that many people to the competition.

Tim Gates

From FIRST Manual...
 

Page 7 of "admin_dray.pdf" (Available Here )

I think it was in other documents from FIRST as well but this is a good start.

Joe J.

http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/DisneyTeamHotels.pdf

At the FIRST page you just click on "Championship Event" and then "Hotels" at the top... Everything is listed right there...

Paying $75 is nothing compared to $325.

The thing is though, the $75 fee is for people that DO NOT stay at Disney hotel, so that makes the argument about Nationals participants taking up space pretty nill. It's true that some buses and large chunk of parking rooms are taken up for the purpose of FIRST competition, but exactly how many people go to Disney World via rental cars/personal cars and take advantage of that parking space? If I remember correctly, large traffic of busses at earlier in the morning (when most of the pit crews attend the pit area) aren't used that much by ordinary tourist, and also the set-up fee for the competition itself is paid by FIRST. (This is not an accurate info, just stuff i got from word of mouth). The only thing that leaves is the cost for the after-competition team party that take place exclusively for the FIRST attendants, but again, not all teams participate in that event.
$75 may not seem like a lot of money, but there are teams participating out of not-so-financially lucky places, and those team's team members along with the team itself might not have the budget to pay those $75 per member fee. From my perspective, that $75 should be covered by Disney as a form of Disney sponcership.

Let’s try a little math…
 

OK, here is an attempt to show that the event fee is not only justified and reasonable, but it is actually a very good deal for those involved. I also want to try to get away from emotional responses, and stick to quantifiable values.

Let’s start with a few initial assertions:

Cost of the National Championship event: $2,500,000 (many estimates of this cost have been publicly discussed, many of which are higher. But let’s stick with the most conservative for now).

Teams attending the Nationals: 260 (from the FIRST website)

Registration cost for Nationals: $4000 per team

Now lets assume that EVERY PENNY of the registration costs are actually available to pay for just the Nationals, and some percentage is not required to support other FIRST activities and operations throughout the year. We know this is not the case, but we will take the most conservative option for this discussion. Then the income generated through team registrations for the National Championship comes to $1,040,000.

That means that there is still $1,460,000 that has to be generated through means other than registration fees to cover the costs of the event.

As has been pointed out in the discussion above, FIRSTers attending the Nationals are not normal tourists. We don’t dump as much cash into Disney as a typical park guest. Our presence at Disney, and utilizing their resources, without infusing cash into the system represents a very real lost "opportunity cost" to Disney (if you haven’t yet, you will learn about opportunity cost in undergrad Economics - take the course, there is a lot of good information in there). It is not appropriate to ask that Disney absorb both this opportunity cost and the shortfall in the required funding for the event - one of those expenses has to be passed on to us.

Now let’s make one assumption: each team has about 35 members attending the event. There are lots of teams that show up with just 10 people, but there are also many that show up with 70 (this thread started with a team that brings 100). 35 is a reasonable first-order average number, based on what has been observed for the past several years of looking at the cheering sections, crowds in the pits, groups in the stands during the awards, etc. Multiply by 260 teams, and you get 9100 team attendees. Round up to 10,000.

Based on that, teams attending the competition SHOULD be kicking in $146 per person over and above their registration costs to cover the full cost of the National Championship event. This cost is independent of where they stay, whether or not they use the Park Hopper Pass, etc. This is also a conservative estimate – the actual event cost could easily be much higher, the portion of the registration fees going to this event is certainly much lower, which results in a much higher event cost per person.

It is noted that there is not a lot of precision to these numbers, but there does not have to be. To first order, the "additional event fee" is really only paying for about half of the services provided to each team member by Disney, after subtracting the elements funded by the registration fee (including building the event venue, bringing in required services and equipment, staff payroll, supplies and materials, wrap party, etc.). Under almost any definition, paying half price for a provided service is a good deal!

None of us are anywhere near naïve enough to believe that Disney swallows this cost out of the goodness of their hearts. Take it as a given that they recover the balance through things like concessions, etc. But the reality is that the event costs money, the event registrations do not cover that cost, and the event attendees need to make up the difference somehow.

So, are there any ways out of this? I happen to believe that the event fees are a reasonable approach. But others obviously don’t, so let me suggest a few alternatives and see what people think might be "better" approaches.

1 - Change the structure of the "Disney package deal" so that it does not include the event fee that is buried within the cost. Make this cost an explicit charge to every team member attending the event, whether they take the Disney package or not.

2 - Re-calculate the registration costs to cover the full price of the event, and eliminate additional participation fees. If that happens, then registration for the Nationals should be around $9600 per team (if you include inflation, it will end up at a nice even $10,000 per team).

3 - Charge an entrance fee at the gate (step one: build a gate) to all team members, guests, visitors, and family members. Remember, you have to make up about $1.5 million, so the entry fee may be as much as $100 per person (assuming the head count goes as high as 15,000 by adding in other park visitors, etc.).

4 - Go back to the system in place last year, which means all the teams purchasing the Disney package keep subsidizing the teams that are not paying their fair share for the event. Teams not buying the Disney package basically force the other teams to pay their bills. To cover the costs, the Disney package price will probably go up even more, making the burden worse for those teams that abide by the rules. But who ever said life was fair?

5 – Spread the National event costs evenly across all registrations. There were 1079 event registrations this year (from the FIRST web site, total teams registered for all regionals and nationals). With growth, estimate 1200 event registrations next year. That would mean each team registration will cost about $1200 more per event.

Are any of these what you really want?

Rather than continuing an endless thread about "Disney is picking my pocket and I don’t think it is fair" could I make a suggestion? If you are offended by the event fee structure this year, then make a constructive, realistic suggestion for an alternative, fair and do-able mechanism by which the costs of the National Championship event can be structured. Then make sure you take responsibility to get your suggestion to the right people at FIRST to have it seriously considered. Doing anything less than that is just whining.

It is a lot more fun to find a solution to a problem than to just complain about one.

-dave

--------------

An engineer with spare time during lunch is a dangerous thing.

Some of the hotels included in the FIRST/Disney package are not on Disney property, rather they are a "good neighbor" hotel which Disney has a partnership with for the National Competition. Normally, Disney would not provide transportation to these hotels, as they are not on the property. However, as a part of the FIRST/Disney package, Disney sends busses out to these neighbor hotels as a convenience for the teams staying there.

NOTE: I had more I was going to say here, but when I hit reply, Dave's post immediately above mine summed it up nicely. I left this part in as it explained something which there was some confusion about regarding the bussing I was referring to.

Re: Just looking in my trusty crystal ball...
 

Where did you get 3 million? Anyways they don't buy it they rent the equipment. Hidden along the walls are little tags of a rental place.

$75*50,000 (Roughly)= 3.75 million dollars. For a "donated event" thats not bad chunck of change.

Now, I know the economy isn't what is was in the 1999 boom, and ABC/Disney is loosing a lot of money. But I hardly consider $75 a bargin. Disney has to relize that most teams just don't have that kind of money. Something like $20 per person and $20 if you want to go to the party is more reasonable. That would be $20*50,000 would be about a million dollars. I can see a million dollars for both the set up of the pits and set up of the competition field. And a million dollars or less for the Epcot party. I mean most of Epcot is closed, and the dance party is crowded, and they do put out way too much food. So I can see that a million dollars can cover the party.

Where do you get 50,000 people paying the $75 dollars? The main outdoor arena only seats somewhere around 22,000 people and that is barely full during opening cerimonies and you have to figure that a lot of those people are family members and other non-participants. A more accurate estimate of the number of people paying the $75 is 9,100 (260 teams @ 35 members per team). This results in a generated revenue of $682,000, quite a lot less than your figure.

I am a Disney Passholder.

I was at Animal Kingdom last weekend.

My kids have every Disney Video there is.

But...

Disney is ripping FIRST teams off by charging teams $75 for "not" staying on Disney property.

The Disney packages are a great deal.... IF you weren't going to be at a FIRST competition all day. Basically, Disney is giving teams a discount on the park tickets and charging full price for the hotel rooms.

We can pay less than $150 bucks a night for a room that 6 students can sleep in. We don't need transportation (Bus trip from 40 miles away). We don't need theme park tickets (our team is watching matches). We don't need meals (I can feed students for $3 a head at Dominoes). For $75 bucks you can by a theme park ticket, a T-shirt, and a coke. If you are a Florida resident you can get a 4 day pass for only $24 dollars more. Still think its a bargain?

For the KSC regional a tent is rented for around $50K that houses 40 teams. Same quality, just smaller.

Basically, all our team gets from Disney at the FIRST events is a large parking lot, electricity, friendly greeters with light sticks and 2 hours in 1/3 of the Epcot park. Oh yeah... Tacos.

I love saying FIRST is the largest event held on Disney property. I love Disney. Unfortunately, Disney is treating FIRST teams like a relative who has stayed too long and worn out their welcome.

Ok we can argue all day about the cost of this but the truth is that no one really knows the cost.

Does anyone have the Disney Hotel room price list from last year?
If Disney really is spreading the cost then the difference between this years packages and last years should be abput $75. If it isnt then something funny is going on.