There are many ways to equitably congratulate prequalified teams on their achievements and contributions to the sport without penalizing the rest of the teams attending CMP. This is not one of those ways.
Having routinely been on teams left scrambling to book hotels after qualifying in Week 6, this feels like a move from HQ that directly makes championship access more inequitable for teams. This is true if your team is attending for the first time, qualifying late, or otherwise unable to find housing through Conference Direct - who notably blocks nearby hotels from selling rooms directly to teams attending the Championship, further hindering access. The complete lack of advance notice or communication to teams on the timeline of the booking process blindsides many teams come December. Teams who require school POs or advance notice to distribute funds are all but forgotten about in the present day format. These factors underscore the need for a complete revamp of the championship housing lottery.
Remember how Conference Direct was calling hotels and forcing them to cancel blocks of rooms that teams had booked outside of Conference Direct? And this was happening ~1-2 weeks before the event, when Conference Direct had closed room reservations?
Glad HQ heard that feedback and stuck with the same vendor.
Likely in the agreement that the hotels signed with conference direct to not bypass their right to be the middleman for all these bookings.
But going ahead and forcing hotels to cancel bookings 1 week out from the event AND being unable to accommodate those teams is certainly a choice.
Gets harder every year to justify the time and cost to be a showpiece for HQ. The on-field product is great (when the field/radios are happy), but everything surrounding it has gotten progressively more painful over the years.
Could it be tortious interference with either an existing or prospective contractual relationship between the team and the hotel?1 Maybe some sort of anticompetitive underlying tort to establish that the forcing/blocking is unjustified?
1 A perhaps partially relevant explanation of Texas law on tortious interference is in this case decision.
Okay, what’s your actual proposal? Prequalified teams are still going to consume roughly the same number of rooms whether they book now or in April. If they get “the good hotel” and know it in December, congrats you paid the cost to be the boss?
Not saying anything positive about Conference Direct here at all, but I don’t think my lead-off question changes under any other booking service.
There’s a million things wrong with how hotel reservations are handled at Championship (and a good chunk of them are the result of Conference Direct) - but I don’t think that pre-qualified teams being able to secure their rooms early is even close to being one of them. Just because those of us who qualify later have a hard time securing rooms doesn’t mean that all teams should have a hard time. The way to achieve equity should be to make the process easier for everyone, not to make it harder for the teams that are pre-qualified.
The biggest question/concern I have with prequalified teams getting advanced booking is how many of the rooms closest to the venue do they take? Are they all on the same lottery system as the rest of us where there are a limited number of rooms available at each hotel or do they just get their preferred hotel? If they have the same chance as everybody else of getting their preferred hotel, then no issues, but if they are getting preferred treatment, then that is an issue.
Presumably, in the stories we’ve heard of Conference Direct finding independently booked reservations and canceling them, the hotel likely violated their contact with Conference Direct and Conference Direct told them cancel the reservation or else they’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor pursue them for breach of contract.
It it a predatory business model? Sure. Is it illegal? Doubtful.
Can someone explain how getting access to requesting hotel blocks 1 day prior to everyone else for pre-qualified teams be such an issue? i.e. Any team can sign up for their preferences from Dec. 6.
It doesnt change the fact in the OP if you have to wait until after you qualify during a week 6 event or later, to try to find a hotel?
As a team that has been around since the 2000 season, we only used the FIRST Housing in 2022 and 2023. All the other years, I booked it for the team on my own with great successes.
This isnt some new system being implemented for 2024. Trying to understand why this wasnt brought up in prior years here.
This is a fair question. As a HOF team, I dont know how its done exactly. We submit our list with preferences the same as everyone else I believe. When we get a hotel from our list, I’ve never compared it to when everyone else finds out whether its the same time or earlier.
If our team wasn’t pre-qualified, I would still do the same thing, but a day later when it opens up…in this case Dec. 6.
Just because a company is guarantee a paycheck that teams help fund doesn’t mean I’m not gonna criticize their practices and ask them to be better.
I posit that the more years they’re in a position of creating horror stories with teams, the more likely threads like this will continue to happen.
Glad this worked for you, but this isn’t an equal experience. Mind sharing tips?
Last year our team spent over a month trying to book a hotel. The CMP housing site showed full. We found plenty of hotels that had capacity but would not let us book because we were a FIRST team. Believe we had a few other people call directly that weren’t our second lead mentor and they left the FIRST part out, but we still sniffed things out in the process and blocked our reservation.
Two weeks before champs we were able to secure a reservation in the FIRST portal after we communicated our issues that for over a month we were trying. These contracts put in place by Conference Direct and the hotels are bogus.
Like Scott said they have a long history of canceling team’s reservation on a whim if they booked outside of their system even though they had no availability themselves.
Happy for you, but also consider how this process has worked for a lot of teams. Understandably there are HOF team benefits for the work they do in the program but effectively bypassing this process before demand skyrockets and creates a mess is frustrating.
In 2022 the LCS Finals overlapped with FIRST in Houston and the same happened with Taylor Swift in 2023. Both of these events had an impact on available hotel rooms.
I think it’s also worth pointing out between 2019 and 2023 the number of FRC teams at the championship has increased by 50% (404 → 620). This certainly doesn’t make the Championship housing problem any easier.
I don’t have an issue with prequalified teams getting early access they’ve earned it and if this is a perk FIRST wants to give to those teams i can live with that. Ultimately it isn’t those teams creating the problem it’s conference direct.
I don’t have a problem with HOF teams at all, and not in this case specifically. Good job y’all!
Somehow the news that booking was available a day earlier than for the rest of us has not come as a surprise to me, I could swear I’ve known about this arrangement for years? Maybe not.
As far as other options.
I don’t know exactly where the sphere of influence ends for Conference Direct but I do know that my team’s wonderful treasurer has successfully booked a suite of rooms about 15 minutes away by car (25 by train) for between $400-500 per night per room (space for 6 in each). I don’t want to spoil it by publicly posting where but I’ll do DMs with folks; I’m just not sure if Conference Direct might get problematic about these as well.
Even so I intend to try to get rooms through the system. We might get a better deal (I doubt it) and might get someplace closer. Or maybe we won’t qualify. Or maybe @scottandme is right and we need to stop throwing $40,000 at the feet of HQ.
I strongly believe that a system where most of the rooms are released to qualified teams on a rolling basis throughout the regular season creates a more equitable process for teams who need housing at the Championship. An additional set of rooms should still be made available for all teams to access starting in December as well.
FIRST should draft an RFP to build the booking system and manage hotel contracts for the event, with the following key requirements:
Teams have access to the portal at any time, but there is a portion of rooms for general availability. Any team can book these rooms, and they’re released in December.
A large percentage of room availability should be released on a rolling basis from Week 1 qualifications in February all the way through Week 6 qualifying events & waitlist teams in April. These rooms are only available to teams when they qualify.
This prevents the initial “rush” of teams trying to reserve rooms in December, since the chances rooms will be available during the regular season is much higher. FIRST should publish data periodically on room availability throughout the season.
FIRST has years of historical trends for when teams qualify for CMP throughout the season, which should be used to inform the quantities of rooms that become available each week to qualifying teams
The largest block of qualifying-team rooms should be released in Week 6, when most Districts qualify their teams
Any hotel contracts must allow teams to book rooms directly with hotels, capacity permitting.
Key dates & process details should be clearly communicated on the FIRST website, emails to teams, and blog posts.
Teams should be able to reserve rooms by providing a small deposit at booking time, and pay the full cost of their rooms later (I believe this is true today, but worth calling out).
Definitely still some details to be considered, but a split system like this (some rooms for general availability, while most are given to teams at qualification time) makes CMP housing more accessible to teams, and functions less like a black box. Would love to hear what folks think about this.
No teams pre book. All teams line up Amazing Race style day of in the Houston airport. Musical chairs music blasts over a city wide PA system. You keep the room you’re in when the music stops
