Nationals accomodations, etc

[Nate Smith]

Originally posted by David Kelly
i think these "mandatory use of the FIRST packages"...

As it stands now, the FIRST packages are not "mandatory." However, the FIRST packages due include an additional charge per person for the costs of the event "village", the additional transportation to the village from the hotels, and the team party. While teams have been able to save money in the past by booking outside of the FIRST package, when they did this, they were effectively asking the teams who did use the FIRST package to pay for the use of the transportation, event village, etc. for the teams who booked outside of the FIRST package. The additional charge was why teams were able to get seemingly the same package from Disney reservations if they did not mention they were a FIRST team there for the competition. The per-person event fee that FIRST is imposing for those teams who book outside of the FIRST/Disney package is their way of attempting to get each team to pay for their own use of what Disney provides for the competition, rather than having some teams fund the use of the facilities for other teams. After all, if you were on a team who was booking within the Disney package(which, according to FIRST, is supposed to be a substantial savings from last year), how would you like to be told, "You owe $XXXX...that's for your hotel, park tickets, and event facilities use...and for the facilities use for teams A, B, and C..." ?