Cost of Attending Championship

[eddie12390]

I'm looking for figures as to how much your team spent to attend Championships in previous years as well as what you did to raise the money required. We'd love to be able to attend for the first time in our team's history, especially considering that this will be the final year of the only member remaining from our teams first year.

[cgmv123]

2013 Championship Expenses for Team 1306
Expenses
Bus $3,750
Hotel $6,143
Food $2,800
Sub $1,400
Tips $350
Registration $5,000
Departments $737

Total $20,243

About 60% was covered by generous sponsor donations, the rest came from student fees. It came out to ~$450/student.

[Jon Stratis]

Cost will vary depending on on a number of factors. Some idea's based on our current planning:

- ~$240/person for airfare, or ~$220/person for a bus... not sure what direction we're going to go yet
- ~$600/room for hotel
- Champs registration fee (I forget what this is, someone else is in charge of that).
- Food (Lunch/Dinner Wednesday, 3 meals Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) per person
- include shipping costs if you have to ship anything other than your robot - we're going to have someone drive our trailer down, so it doesn't apply to us.
- Transportation around town if you fly and don't have a bus at your disposal - the metro there works pretty well, and you can get some week-long passes for everyone.

[leeivyca]

Team 766 will be coming from the west coast so a bus is not an option for us, we are all buying plane tickets. I agree that rental cars are not really essential, if you try and book a hotel that is within a mile of the Dome you can either walk or take the Metro everywhere.

The expenses mentioned by the other responders look pretty accurate, although our team asks the individual team members and parents to pay for their own travel and food expenses, then the team budget pays for teacher/mentor travel, robot shipping, and registration.

If you tell your sponsors "we have been selected to go to the Championships in St. Louis" sometimes they will give you extra $$ just to cover the extra costs.

[TikiTech]

Start calling all current and past sponsors/donators and give them the good news of your teams accomplishment. Get out there finding more sponsors. Call the local paper and radio stations, many have free local news areas. Most have time and space to publish the article. Call the mayors office / city counsel they like to hear of local students making a positive achievement. Create a public fundraising event. You would be surprised what can happen.

Many costs are generally the same for every team. As mentioned above.

Hotel
Rental car / bus / metro
Food
Fun
Registration Fee

Easily figured out to the cost per person.

Some are not.

Shipping
Trains, planes & automobiles

The further away the more costly.

Our airfare can easily get over 1000 per person when booking in such a short notice. And shipping crates, oh my. A boat usually takes 11 days to the US west coast. Hope for good weather and no dock strikes. When having to make it there in such a short time the robot get to fly too.. I think 6k was for one way.

Last year we took 25 students and 5 mentors. Since the time between qualifying and the world championships was 5 weeks. We had to generate close to 60k for the trip!

One of the dues we pay to live in paradise...

Good luck in the championships, hope to see you there.
If you do go, stop by our pit and say hi, we made it as well, like yesterday

Now we are in the same boat together.. *starts dialing*

Aloha!

[Cathy1153]

If you are in need of rooms for NE Championship, we have overbooked(and are under contract) and have rooms in walking distance of BU-(and this is my very first post, so if I did it wrong. . . )

[RoboMom]

Originally Posted by Cathy1153

If you are in need of rooms for NE Championship, we have overbooked(and are under contract) and have rooms in walking distance of BU-(and this is my very first post, so if I did it wrong. . . )

Cathy, right intent, wrong thread.

They are talking about St. Louis. If you still can, delete this post and find one about the NE Championships.

Welcome to cd!

[Chris_Elston]

Different teams and different ideas of cost.

I can count the times we've been to Championship on one hand, and I guess from a small town of 23,000 thousand people, we do Championship on a budget, not thousands of dollars.

My kids pay about $100-$150.00 each for their travel and that can be reduced by us helping them raise some money while we are waiting. I believe we can reduce the cost per student to only $100.00 per student to attend the championship with 4 students staying in a room by simply raising about $2,000 that is divided among 30-35 students.

We stay outside of St. Louis to keep the room rate down under $100 or right around $100 per night. Unfortunately, I don't agree with the "Steele Meetings" championship housing and doesn't lend itself very cost friendly for teams that are trying NOT to spend thousands on attending championships, so we AVOID steele meetings all together. We also divide the team into an EARLY CREW and Rest of the team. This reduces the nights required for hotel rooms significantly. Instead of booking 4 nights for everyone, you book 4 nights for a few people, and 3 nights for the rest of the team. For a regional we do the same, book 3 nights for a few, and 2 nights for everyone else. This is done to reduce the hotel costs.

We really appreciate, the fact we can drive to Championship. That is a location advantage we have, I assume over teams that have to fly.

We carpool with parents or mentors, which reduces the cost even further and just reimburse gas to those who drive, unless they are good hearted and donated their gas to the team. Being a 4-H team, we don't have access to school busses, so our only options are carpool or rent a charter bus. We rented a charter bus in 2007, which broke down and was the worst experience ever. It was not worth the $6500 and the headache of what to do with a bus all weekend, parking fees, and driver tips. Having parents and mentors that can help you car pool is very nice, because you have your own built in adult chaperones to help you keep track of your kids. Have a mandatory TRAVEL MEETING the Monday before your event to assign carpool seats and hotel rooms and talk about the event before you leave.

The kids are responsible for their own food money but typically we stay at a hotel that offers free breakfast and this time our hotel is offering a "snack bar" in the evenings. We also do a signup genius for parents to donate food and we do a tailgate LUNCH for the kids for free. Here is an example of one we just did for Pittsburgh.

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0D...E3-pittsburgh1

So costing for the team? Just the registration fee of $5000, which is GRACIOUSLY paid for by our major sponsor UTC.

Cost to the students? About $100-$150 per plus food.
The cost per student includes monies to pay for gas and travel expenses.

Hope that helps shows a shoestring approach.