How much would you pay to go to a conference?

Almost every company I know is cutting back on attending conferences. It makes complete sense. They need to watch their expenditures at a time like this.

However, interestingly, conferences such as Microsoft’s TechEd developer conference don’t seem to reflect this realization. The conference to be held next month on May 11-15th is still upwards of $2000 to attend.

Now there are less expensive ways of attending TechEd. I did see a half-price ad on Hotmail today for California attendees. I wish I’d copy/pasted the discount code to pass along. Hopefully someone else notices it and posts it online. I expect there are quite a few people that would like to take advantage of it.

The half price deal notwithstanding, for the professional developer I think even $1000 is pretty steep although if you figure in transportation and a hotel room I guess the number doesn’t seem all that high.

And there is a $100 Expo Pass that’s also available for people like me that would appreciate the Expo area as much as other things at the conference. That’s the option I’m going to take.

However, I’m a bit perplexed why there isn’t a one day pass? Would it really be that much of a management problem to handle? Let’s say for $199 (Yes! I’m suggesting that the whole conference be much less expensive too!) you could attend a single day at TechEd. That would basically null out the hotel requirement and reduce your expenses to one day of travel. I’ve taken this option at other conferences. It’s not that bad if there’s let’s say one session you just have to attend and time left over for the booths. For people flying in from the local region, we’re talking about $200-$300 for a round trip. That’s not bad and a lot less than several thousand.

What’s funny about this one day pass idea is that in reality that’s what most people I know tend to do anyway–the press especially. They come in for a day, watch the keynote, maybe visit with a couple people and then they’re gone. Lots of people seem to tend to do this. That’s why opening days can be so overwhelming. Doesn’t it make sense therefore to budget one day passes to account for this? With the world being computerized and all is it really that difficult to implement? I think not.