Tim Beatty
AAEA President
September 2024
In my first presidential column, I thought I would spend some time talking about how we choose our meeting locations. In my time serving on the board, I've participated in many discussions about where the AAEA should hold our Annual Meetings. An important thing to realize is that our meetings are booked 5-years out. Last year, we signed a contract with the Marriott Marquis in Washington D.C. for our 2029 (Washington, DC) and are sending out the RFP for the 2030 meetings this week. This long planning horizon makes it challenging to make changes in the short run.
So, how does the Board go about choosing a location for the meetings? The first step is when the AAEA staff send out a request for bids to cities across the country. Unfortunately, the size of our meetings rules out many seemingly plausible locations. AAEA meetings are large enough that many sites don't have convention hotels with enough meeting rooms to accommodate the large number of simultaneous sessions we need (a minimum of 30, a 10,000 square foot plenary room, and a 10,000 square foot Poster Hall). While splitting the conference across multiple hotels is something we have done in the past, and are open to considering in the future, this typically comes at a higher price. The same also holds true for meetings centered around a convention center.
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Diego Cardoso, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign