alt.hn

4/14/2026 at 5:12:31 PM

PyCon US 2026: Why we're asking you to think about your hotel reservation

 https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2026/04/pycon-us-2026-hotels.html

by alibarber

4/14/2026 at 8:24:01 PM

I miss PyCon US a lot and I'm sad I can't go. As a Canadian, recent USA ICE government actions have made it really hard for me to attend.

No conference is worth getting thrown in an ICE detention camp. This actually has happened to people from my country. [1] [2]

A big part of this conference is the non-USA residents who show up.

> We attribute this largely to the sad but understandable decline in willingness of international attendees, as well as some vulnerable domestic attendees

It seems like part of the hotel problem is the lack of international attendees that are stopping travel to the USA travel due to recent government actions.

In general USA-Canada Travel has been down all year. [3]

Hoping for a future PyCon that is as big, but I don't have to take risks around my freedom to attend!

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/10/ice-canadian...

[2] https://ca.news.yahoo.com/canadian-man-detained-ice-dies-200...

[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2026/03/19/canada...

by jquaint

4/14/2026 at 10:11:57 PM

Why not move the conference to a friendly country? Like Canada maybe?

by garyfirestorm

4/14/2026 at 6:15:55 PM

It wasnt clear from the blog so I'll ask here. Where does the money go? The post refers to providing tickets to underprivileged attendees, but is that 100% or ony some part of it? Where does the rest of the money go?

by bitpush

4/14/2026 at 9:37:46 PM

> Once your event outgrows academic spaces, donated conference rooms, or theatre spaces, working with the hotels is the industry’s standard way to pay for a professional convention center space. You commit to a certain number of hotel nights blocked off at nearby hotels, based on your event’s numbers from previous years, and in return, you get a reduced rental charge at the convention center. If you sell enough rooms, you additionally earn a small percentage of the revenue from those rooms, i.e. a commission. If, on the other hand, you don’t sell enough rooms, you owe damages to the hotels–essentially paying the full rate for the rooms they reserved for your event but didn’t sell.

Attendees pay the Hotel directly for their rooms. If the event does not book enough rooms to cover expenses then the organizer (PyCon) owes a minimum amount to the Hotel. If there are more rooms booked than expected the Organizer gets a check. This is a normal Hotel industry arrangement.

PyCon itself is run by the Python Software Foundation; according to publicly-available records they spent approximately US$2,491,000 on PyCon US expenses in 2024, including supporting 552 travel grant recipients: https://www.python.org/psf/records/

by eugenekay