Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
I have paid nearly double in airfare flying to St. Louis vs Atlanta. Being the biggest Delta hub in the world, it was both easy to find a pair of flights to Atlanta and didn't cost a fortune. St. Louis has always been more expensive for me. I'll do some research after this exam and see if that's changed recently; maybe Atlanta got more expensive or is harder to move 40 students at a time through or something. No comment on hotels though.
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Atlanta has way more flights than STL, but it is cheaper from the east coast, between 40 and $200 cheaper, from a quick search for BOS, PHL, and JFK. St Louis is generally more expensive for those of us on the west coast.
I don't remember the FIRST hotel packages costing any more in Atlanta than they do now. I am convinced there were both more and higher quality hotel rooms available in close proximity to the venue in Atlanta though.
I slightly prefer the actual venue in St Louis because it's easier to walk from the dome to the pits, but everything else about St Louis sucks in comparison to Atlanta, in my opinion. The airport is smaller and has way fewer direct flights (one a day, on one airline, for the Bay Area. Atlanta probably has 20+ direct flights a day), there's less to do in the immediate area of the venue for students, there's fewer food choices, it's impossible to eat a good meal during event hours as all the food in the venue is either bad or bad for you and overpriced (CNN center was great for this), the weather isn't as good, etc etc.
The one thing it does have going for it is it seems nominally safer, as the entire place is pretty much a ghost town and you run pretty good odds of never seeing anyone on the streets after 8 or 9 PM. Atlanta had homeless people that were fairly shameless about approaching people and trying to get money and if you went a few blocks in the wrong direction things could get a little sketchy, but I never felt threatened.