Two-day TechEd pass for California residents: $995

As I mentioned the other day in the post on the excessive cost of attending events such as TechEd, Microsoft is making available some discount offers to this year’s TechEd event to be held in Los Angeles May 11-15th.

The offer shown at right, which I found on Hotmail’s browser page, gives California residents a two-day pass for $995. That’s half the price–admittedly for 1/2 the time, but let’s be serious, most people will only attend for two days anyway. The price is still steep and I have no idea why it’s not offered to people in Arizona or Nevada (Las Vegas) that are closer than even California residents from let’s say Redding. Even people in St. George are closer. Heh.

Now if anyone is interested here’s the deal for California residents: Two days, $995. Just enter the code ATCAVY4R when registering.

If I look at this offer with my recession wary glasses, I come to the belief that it’s twice as expensive as it should be. Sorry, $495 per day to see a keynote, maybe one session and the Expo floor is too much. Now, yes, someone might attend two or three sessions to “get their money’s worth,” but the reality is that $495/day is a rate best reserved for wealthier times. Let me put it this way: Would anyone from Microsoft give the goahead to their team to spend $1000 plus travel and hotel for a two day event in today’s economy? Not unless you really, really have to I bet.

Let’s hope this time around that community attendees not only use Twitter, but actually broadcast parts of the event live on UStream. Maybe we need to organize this a bit and be sure there are people willing to broadcast many of the in demand sessions.