“Tales from the CirqueCon, Part The First”
By: Keith Johnson – Seattle, Washington (USA)
* * *
We knew it was going to be a learning experience.
As preparations for CirqueCon continue, we thought it would be fun to “tell the story” of our preparations. We’re not whining about how hard it is, but some of the challenges we’ve faced have sure been, uh, interesting, and worth telling. So consider this the first of what we hope to be a running commentary.
When CirqueCon Vancouver 2004 ended, the “instigators” (Jeff Tolotti, Ricky Russo, and I) started talking about the direction we should take. The issue was whether to keep it smaller and exclusive (a gathering of good friends), or larger and inclusive (the big tent). Over time, the thinking evolved that if we were to do another one, this time with Cirque’s blessing from the start, the approach would have to be more inclusive. But this would mean it would be different from the smaller “gathering of close friends” that was CirqueCon Vancouver 2004. We knew it would be bigger, involve a longer lead-time, and present different challenges. And as we expected, new challenges sure did arise! But we knew we had to handle them simply and with as low cost as possible.
Offering a “group purchase” of tickets was one of them. I was hoping we would function the same way we had for Vancouver – everyone buys his or her tickets separately. And when Cirque came to us with a proposal for a group purchase I hoped we could do the same thing – have Cirque set aside a certain number of tickets that could be purchased individually.
But that’s not how group sales work. They were happy to set aside a block of seats – and some of the best in the tent, in middle Section 205 directly surrounding the soundboard. They also offered us 200 tickets, which I felt was more than enough for our needs. But they wanted one check for the final purchase. So the only way to make it work was if we did all the accounting work in-house – taking tickets, processing money, paying Cirque and distributing the tickets back to our members. It would be a headache, but we thought if we came up with a simple record-keeping system we could make it work. It also sounded like a good service to offer our members.
So we agreed and set up the tickets to be offered until the end of October. We converted the value of the tickets from Canadian dollars to US Dollars with exchange rates we had at the time (this will become important later). We set up a PayPal account so people could send money electronically, and erstwhile editor Richasi set up our “official” website.
We got quite a lot of interest, but many people felt the date of the show (April 23, when several colleges are still going through finals) combined with the early cutoff (6 months prior to show date) meant they couldn’t commit. I expressed this to our Group Sales contact at Cirque who, while noting the general public on-sale date had been postponed from November to December, allowed another month for taking tickets. So the new deadline became the end of November, and we got several more ticket purchases.
At the end of November we had sold 52 tickets. We communicated that to Cirque, who faxed us an invoice to pay. Then we ran into our first, um, challenge. In the months since we first offered the tickets, the US dollar plunged 15% in value against most world currencies, including the Canadian dollar. So tickets that were worth $68.00 USD in July, were costing us $76.00 USD when it came time to pay in December. How embarrassing to not have accounted for that! It put us in a panic; this was something we weren’t expecting. Yet having had contact with all our ticket purchasers, we suspected they would understand if asked to pay the balance. We are, after all, just fans doing this for other fans. But we had promised to get tickets in their hands before Christmas, so we couldn’t hold them while we waited for extra money to come in. What to do? My wife LouAnna and I decided to cover the shortfall temporarily out of our own personal
funds, advise all the tickets buyers and ask them to contribute an additional $8.00 per ticket. So far, we’ve had good response.
With the invoice from Cirque in hand, we now had to pay for our tickets. Cirque takes some credit cards, cashiers checks or certified checks in Canadian dollars. We figured this would be no big sweat; we’d give them our American Express card and let the card do the Canadian to US dollar conversion for us (after all, that’s what they recommend you do on vacation). So we happily gave Cirque the AMEX card and thought we were done with it. But the charge was rejected the first time as being too large for a card used as infrequently as our card was. After we reconfirmed our status with AmEx Cirque tried the card again, again without success – this time Cirque needed to provide AmEx with our billing address (a security measure). Finally, on the third try the charge was accepted.
But then I found out it was a hundred American dollars more than I estimated. I then learned American Express charges a 3% fee for the conversion process itself, which, with the large amount of the invoice was somewhere in the range of the aforementioned $100.00. That was insane, it was way more than I would ever want to pay for that service. So I asked Cirque to cancel that charge and I would pay them in some other manner. They agreed to cancel the credit card but only when they had received some other form of payment (smart of them!).
So I looked at any other way I could cheaply get payment to Cirque. Bank checks would cost between $35-45. I could wire the money directly to Cirque’s bank account, but that would cost $60.00 and be too complicated. And it would cost $20.00 to send any check to Cirque via overnight mail. After looking at multiple options I decided on getting a “bank check” from my local bank (which would take four business days and cost $35.00), and overnight it to Cirque. Within a week the problem was handled. Cirque sent me the initial order of tickets, which my wife and I promptly divided, enveloped and mailed on December 10th.
Meanwhile, Cirque had another idea brewing. While I was happy with our numbers, Cirque wanted to increase our participation. We felt we had covered as much of “Cirque Internet fandom” as we could with updates and posts to Cirque Club, Cirque Tribune, and the faulty Cirque du Soleil Yahoogroup. But they proposed something extraordinary – a special message from Cirque Club to a number of their vast database of Cirque Club members! While that was a nice offer, we privately wished they had come up with the idea sooner. In any case the deadline for tickets had already passed and tickets would soon be going on sale to the general public. They responded by offering to hold tickets another two weeks, until December 15th. Not
only that, they offered to continue to hold our seats in Section 205 and also blocked the last two rows of the lower-priced Category 2 Section 203.
With a shortened lead-time of two weeks, could we be “light on our feet” and responsive enough quickly enough? If Cirque was making such an extraordinary offer we felt we had to at least try. So we dropped everything and quickly revamped the website to reflect the new reality. We made sure we could easily handle any additional requests, though we really weren’t sure how many we would get. A day later we told Cirque we were ready and waited for the message to be sent out.
And waited. For a week.
On December 8th a message went out from Cirque Club to 50,000 of their members. It said…
“Is there anything more magical than Old Montreal in the springtime? Well maybe Old Montreal in the springtime during a Cirque du Soleil world premiere weekend!
Some of our most dedicated fans are organizing an event next spring in Montreal for Cirque du Soleil fans from around the world. This unofficial gathering, headed by Keith Johnson from Seattle, Washington, will be taking place during the world premiere weekend of Cirque 2005 next April and we are thrilled to help him get the message out to you.
– The event runs from Friday, April 22, 2005 to Sunday, April 24, 2005.
– Cirque 2005 tickets for the conference are for Saturday, April 23, 2005 at 8:00 p.m.
– The conference is organized by Keith Johnson, LouAnna Valentine and Ricky Russo.
This event is not being organized by Cirque du Soleil but we will be there to help make it an unforgettable weekend! For more information, please visit their website < http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/go.asp?p=3288&l=en&m=97F504FC37CF4F0D96E9AEF9C6C4AD4F&v=0 >.
See you in the spring!”
Boy, what a build-up: “…An unforgettable weekend!” Thankfully they were saying it, not us, so it had some credibility. And the emails started rolling in. We added another 30 or so members who bought 15 tickets (and with others getting their own, 23 total tickets meant almost 80% would be going). But it was a rush to get people into the database and paying within the compressed week we had. But by putting in a whole lot of time, we got it done.
With almost 100 people this isn’t going to be anything like CirqueCon Vancouver. I’m sure that will disappoint some, who were looking forward to another intimate gathering of Internet-related friends, as Vancouver was. But we knew when Cirque suggested Montreal as our next stop that we would have to be more inclusive and thereby larger. Though we’re right where I expected us to be – three times the members we had in Vancouver – our larger numbers present tactical problems. But that’s mostly Cirque’s issue; they will have to deal with 100 people for whatever we do with them. My next major project will be trying to find a restaurant that might be able to work with us on a group meal in a reasonable fashion.
Have I mentioned searching for a hotel?
THE HOTEL
With Cirque pitching their 2005 show tent in their traditional location of Jacques Cartier pier in Old Montreal, I wanted to try and find a reasonably priced hotel within walking distance. Montreal has an excellent subway system, but I though we should first try to find a facility in Old Montreal. Though the area is full of hotels and inns most all of them presented two problems.
First, they were all expensive. With 15% taxes their total cost per night averaged $180-200 USD. In our initial budgeting my wife and I had used a figure of $100.00 per night for lodging, basing that on what we paid for Vancouver. But that was a Bed and Breakfast outside of the downtown core. Now we were trying to look in-town, in the highest-rent area of town, filled with up-scale “boutique”-type hotels.
Second, the hotels were small. We had rented 16 hotel rooms in Vancouver, and I felt that we would at least double and possibly triple it. So that meant we needed between 30 and 50 rooms. That threw out most of the hotels in Old Montreal.
But there was one hotel that caught my eye, an offshoot of a chain well known in America for its quality; the Marriott SpringHill Suites Old Montreal. The hotel is a business-oriented facility (very similar to Residence Inn), offering amenities geared toward traveling businessmen. The rooms are slightly larger than normal and each comes complete with a double-sized sleeper sofa. In addition they offer a complete hot continental breakfast included with the room. And, most importantly, it was about 1/4 mile from the Cirque tent!
But would they want to do business with such an “informal” event as CirqueCon? Once I convinced their sales department that we were really a large “family reunion” we were able to work out a deal. There was some risk on our end, as we had to guarantee the hotel a certain number of room/nights (1 room occupied for 1 night is one room/night). If we failed to reach our number of 62 we would be financially on the hook to the hotel, and would have to compensate
them for any lost income. Potentially dangerous, but we felt we could easily fill 62 room nights.
We convinced the Hotel to offer us a room/night price slightly better than any other deal out there (even the Internet) advising them our members wouldn’t have any hesitation booking through cheaper means if available. Soon they were ready to open up the reservation lines to anybody who said they were with CirqueCon. But by our rules we had to restrict reservations to those that had paid for the research, namely paid Standard Members. So, once again, we were compelled to keep the process in-house. But after thinking through what we needed we made the offer to our Standard members and got quite a bit of response. We quickly filled 22 rooms, with their 80 room nights easily surpassing our minimum of 62. That made us feel a whole lot better, as we were off the (financial) hook!
For the first 22 rooms everyone got the kind of room they requested. Then business realities kicked in. In terms of business to the hotel we are small fry. We don’t want a lot of rooms, don’t want to use and pay for function space, and want to do everything with as little cost as possible. Another, larger group reserving space in the hotel would be given preference. And so it was, with a large tour group checking in Thursday evening.
After we had sent the hotel our first wave of room requests they informed us they only had 12 or so more rooms to give, and that they didn’t have any two-bed rooms available. This could put a crimp on us, as I thought the double/double bedrooms would be quite popular. By this time Cirque was in preparation for sending their Cirque Club message, so we updated the website to mention the restriction and that the hotel would want a minimum two-night stay for any further reservations. Still we got an additional 13 room reservations, bringing our total to 35 rooms – 30% of the total rooms at the Hotel! And with that the hotel advised they had no more rooms available for the time being, so we have had to start a waiting list.
That brings us up to date! The first wave of folks now has their tickets and room reservations. And “Wave 2” will be getting their tickets by the end of January. Next up on our agenda: getting our members to put their room reservations on their own credit cards.
And looking for a place to eat.
