Quote:
Originally Posted by Donut
I've seen this mentioned in other threads before so I just wanted to mention it. Atlanta is NOT centralized. It was a good venue and it is the busiest airport in the US in terms of passenger volume, however it is no closer to the center of the country than Las Vegas, and is quite a bit further than the current championships in St. Louis. Once the championship is more than a 6 hour drive away flying begins to look like a better option and many teams will always be forced to fly to attend, so a good international airport is more important than a centralized location IMO.
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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?