Question about districts

[mdituri]

As the head mentor, I just put in all of my paperwork and was board approved pending qualification for the overnight travel. I have already booked hotel rooms for both MAR Champs and St. Louis. We eat the cancellation fee at St. Louis if we don't qualify. I would love to purchase 30 airline tickets out of Newark Airport now using group sales and if we don't go, just sell them to some other team, but if I can't find another team to use them, then I am in big trouble. Using group sales, I only need to put the names on the week before and can change them once for free. I have actually looked into purchasing 300 tickets for "MAR", 1/2 out of Philadelphia and 1/2 out of Newark, for teams to reimburse us when they win their place, but we certainly don't have liquid assets to put out that kind of money and we decided that it would be better to have teams do it themselves. It would be cheaper overall for MAR teams to have them pre-booked, but I certainly don't have a black American Express to put it on.

[Carol]

In MAR at least, since about half the teams qualify for the Region Champs, there is a good number of teams after their first competition who are pretty sure they will qualify. And at least half of the teams (if not more) are within driving distance so they don't use hotels.

Last year MAR (actually, the poster right above me did) arranged blocks of rooms at local hotels for Region Champs, which was a big help for some teams. I don't know if Michigan does as well.

[DonRotolo]

As do others who have posted, we reserve our rooms early and will pay the cancellation fee if necessary - it isn't that much.