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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood this obsession in the tech industry with holding small to medium sized conferences in major cities.

For something truly humongous you need a Las Vegas, but as a participant I'd much prefer the conference just book a hotel somewhere in the woods, or in a relatively small town.

The usual counterargument is airport connectivity etc.

But in most cases you can simply drive for X amount of time away from the urban center the airport is serving, instead of towards it, and find a perfectly serviceable venue that could host a conference of the same size.

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You hold a small to mid conference in SF and the plurality of your audience and presenters will not need to pay for a place to stay. That means the quality of your conference will increase significantly.

Place it in another major city and they can easily fly there and find a place to stay there. Being a major city their companies may have subsidiaries there so they may be able to do other company work and add this onto a company trip.

And if you’re an international conference, you should probably limit yourself to something like 5 cities or else everyone from outside the US will likely struggle and not be able to make a real trip outside of it.

Holding conferences anywhere outside major cities does not seem to make any sense to me.

I run some events and hear opinions from both sides often. My take on this is there are basically two types of conferences. A more remote location helps people have more fun hanging out with each other, but a big city venue enable more people to attend. Both have value and there are middlegrounds, the choice depends entirely on what you’re looking for.

Most conferences are field-trips/paid-vacation for businesspeople. A large part of the attraction is being in a fun destination.

> I've never understood this obsession in the tech industry with holding small to medium sized conferences in major cities.

It's because there are advantages to major cities: (1) connectivity; (2) incumbent audience; (3) capacity; (4) entertainment;

LV mostly wins on 3 and 4 but loses on 1 and 2. NYC and Chicago win on all 4.

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