Your hotel room won’t look like this, but when you are sleeping it won’t matter anyway.
Hotels, Hotels, Hotels
If you haven’t thought about booking rooms for your teams at your events yet, now is the time!
When you book through FIRST, you’ll be close to the venue and get good rates at quality hotels. At many hotels, you’ll also get FIRST-contracted amenities like free breakfast* and WiFi. Also, you’ll be sharing the hotel with other *FIRST *Robotics Competition teams, which can add to the fun.
*FIRST *Championship housing information will be available mid-December. Sign up here to be notified as soon as housing and travel discounts become available.
**FIRSTChoice
Don’t forget, *FIRST *Choice Round 1 Priority Lists are locked in at Noon, Eastern Time, Wednesday, December 5. Even if you haven’t secured your registration fee yet, you can still create a priority list! However, only teams who have secured (in other words ‘paid for’, see acceptable forms of payment here) their initial registration fees by Noon, Eastern Time, Wednesday, December 5 will receive items from the *FIRST *Choice Round 1 process. See the details here.
While I’m all about supporting First, my experience has been that teams willing to do a little bit of work can save a lot of money. In Houston two years ago, we booked a Wingate about 20 minutes out and saved over $1,000.
The events sites don’t seem to let us claim rewards points for bookings so I’m guessing Frank gets his free bacon from our points. Quite the scam for some bacon but at least someone gets credit for our stays.
Corporate rates are a double-edged sword; sometimes lower prices, generally no rewards. I’m sure Frank’s bacon comes from his own travels, and/or horse-trading a large bowl of M&Ms with the green ones removed.
So far the FRC site had higher prices than the sites for the 2 hotels I looked at a few weeks ago. I didn’t book anything yet (was “pricing” volunteer costs to argue with the wife), but knowing you can’t get rewards with those rates doesn’t help my opinion…
I’ve booked through Experient the last several championships (I just volunteer there myself, my team isn’t there, so it’s just me) and the Experient rates have been points-eligible for me. I just have to take the confirmation number that I (eventually) get from Experient and go plug it into the hotel’s site and link up my account to the reservation and all is well.
Also, I just tried booking a room at Hilton Americas (where I was last year in Houston, attached to the convention center) and it was significantly higher than what I paid last year through Experient.
a) I have encountered free bacon[1] on several occasions. You probably have to call individual properties to ask what their breakfast includes, but it’s out there.
b) Not having other teams around makes breakfast a lot less insane.
[1] Theoretically not truly free, but included in the room rate. However, I’ve never seen a hotel check room keys, let alone validate[2] them
[2] Which takes us into all the fun things[3] we do around hacker cons…
[3] Don’t worry, you can trust the ATMs at Worlds[4].
