How Not To Run A Convention

[major_clanger]

It sounds as if Jack O'Con (last weekend in Albuquerque) is going to be a star addition to the list of Great Conrunning Disasters:

Jack O’Con – The Comic Convention That Suddenly Wasn’t (Bleeding Cool News)

One Artist Attending Jack O’Con Tells Their Story (Bleeding Cool News)

An attending dealer tells his story

I suspect that there's a lot more to come out of this, but it sounds like a one-man con-committee way out of his depth (and that may be the charitable explanation). A lot of people are criticising the hotel, but if advance payments hadn't been made then the management were probably erring on the side of helpfulness by allowing function space payment on the day rather than just cancelling the even a week out. Hotels usually require a hefty function space payment in advance, which, by the way, is why it is so damaging if a payment provider such as PayPal decides to sit on your income for 'fraud prevention' reasons until the organisers can show paid invoices, as that totally wrecks your cash flow.

I am also a bit wary of the report that the hotel management tried to claim that the contract included unauthorised amendments by a departed manager that they weren't going to honour. Firstly, that sounds suspiciously like an organiser's excuse to me, unless verified. And secondly, unless New Mexico contract law is way out of line with that in most common-law jurisdictions, an event manager would in my view be deemed to be acting for the hotel and there would need to be some pretty convincing evidence to show otherwise ("but he signed this napkin to approve our having the dealer room free over the weekend!" would, for example, probably not hold water). There's a reason why I often find myself typing "...or employees, servants or agents" in legal pleadings.

This sort of thing, by the way, is why Nine Worlds got a slightly leery reaction when it popped up early this year promising a 1500-person event with novel crowdsourced funding run by a handful of people few in any established fandom had heard of. Now it turned out really well of course but wariness towards new cons that promise a lot can, as this debacle shows, have some justification.

 

Comments

[watervole]

Interesting post. Sounds like the event organiser used the bedroom money to pay the guests booked through his agency...

[redbird]

Yes, a concom may be effectively unable to enforce a contract if the hotel decides, a month or three out, that hey, this wedding would be more lucrative. But that's a combination of lead time for litigation, and that winning the lawsuit leaves you dependent for the weekend on people who resent your being there, which is not likely to produce good service. However, that's very different from claiming "unauthorised amendments to the contract." It's not as though a halfway-competent conrunner would have started with a contract that said "we don't have to give you access to the paid-for space."

[major_clanger]

I can only speak for the situation under English law, but I suspect that in many respects the situation in most US states would be similar.

Yes, you technically could seek an injunction for specific performance, but for the reasons you allude to this may not be a good idea for an event where the performance required is the provision of hospitality. I would suggest a polite but firm letter setting out the convention's expenses to date and likely costs of cancellation, and pointing out that breaking one contract in favour of a more lucrative one is the sort of conduct that can lead to (a) an award of exemplary damages (even in English courts, notoriously shy of anything smacking of punitive damage awards) and (b) an order to pay all of our legal costs.

[dalmeny]

That does sound like an extraordinarily badly-run con.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of the tiny first-time con in Las Cruces whose organizer was sure of attracting thousands of attendees...so confident in their hubris that they flew in Guest of Honor James Hogan from Ireland (ironically, not that long before he relocated to Florida).

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Oh dear.

And was this before JPH went into his "I'm going to make Orson Scott Card look like a tree-hugging vegan polysexual hippie" phase?

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons 9W seems to have gonequite well is that after they popped up a number of established UK conrunners got in touch with them and offered to advise on various aspects if the 9W people would like, and I know of at least one case where it was taken up and improved their hotel arrangements considerably (at least so I'm told)). So much for the "evil S**fs who attempt to crush any upstarts who date to encroach on their territory. Was it here or on purplecthulhu's blog where there was an exchange worrying about whether all their listed guests and the committee did have a clear common understanding of the mutual arrangements - one of their committee popped up and reassured us they did but there was some odd attitude from them, quickly corrected by the host and myself that we borethem no ill-will nor regarded them as threatening interlopers, butdidn't want to see a debacle like the one you mention above.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

It was here (see post).