How do I find the least cost location for a meeting with participants
coming from different locations

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Clarification of Question by brianj-ga on 05 Aug 2002 14:24 PDT

I'm willing to stipulate several things:

1. all travel is assumed to be from the nearest city with regular air
service
2. the selected location is a major city with regular air service
3. participants found to be within 100 miles of the best location will
drive at no cost impact on the model (ex. - travel from Baltimore MD
to Wash. DC is free)
4. US government per diem (lodging plus meals and incidental expenses)
allowances apply
5. the season is fall, roughly October 1 to November 30.

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Request for Question Clarification by websearcher-ga on 05 Aug 2002 16:28 PDT

Hi brianj:

Is it possible that one (or more) of the meeting participants might be
able to host the meeting if it were held in their city? That would
allow you to save on the overall cost of renting meeting space and
would affect the algorithm....

Thanks. 

websearcher-ga

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Clarification of Question by brianj-ga on 05 Aug 2002 17:15 PDT

My operating assumtion is that the cost of meeting space and food will
be approximately the same no matter where the meeting is held.  Who
hosts should not be a factor.  It is likely that the space will be
free and the food purchased.

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Clarification of Question by brianj-ga on 05 Aug 2002 17:17 PDT

Pardon my errors, there is no last minute spell check.  I meant
"assumption".  Please excuse this and other "spellos".

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Request for Question Clarification by websearcher-ga on 05 Aug 2002 17:38 PDT

Another question......

Are you assuming that *everyone* at the meeting will be using *all* of
the US gov. per diem? In other words, if someone lives in/near the
host city, will they be lodging at home, thereby saving the
accommodation part of their expenses?

If this is the case, how "close" to the host city would an attendee
have to be to lodge at home?

If this is not the case, and you assume everyone will have equal per
diem bills, the only variable cost you seem to have left is travel to
the meeting city and back. (???)

Thanks for all the clarifications. :-) 

websearcher-ga

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Clarification of Question by brianj-ga on 06 Aug 2002 05:02 PDT

Because the meetings are likely to start early each day, I'd expect
"local" participants to drive not more than 20 miles.  Participants
who live beyond that distance would require lodging.

Hi brianj-ga:

We've finished the first part of solving your travel problem:
clarifying exactly what the parameters are that need to be included in
our calculations. Given your comments, it appear that the only things
you need to take into account are:

1. Lodging expenses for each attendee, except if they are within 20
miles of the meeting place.

2. Air travel expenses for each attendee, except if they are within
100 miles of the meeting place.

Everything else is either being ignored or is being assumed to be
equal cost for all locations, so does not need to be included in your
"least cost location" calculations.

The next thing you need to do is determine, for each attendee, whether
they are within the 100-mile radius of a city with regular air
service. (You can assume that the meeting itself will be held in a
city with regular air service.) Create a table that has the attendee
name in one column and a list of 100-mile radius cities for each in
the second column.

Create a third column in that table for the 20-mile radius cities for
each attendee. (The cities in column 3 will be a subset of the cities
in column 2.)

Unless your attendees all live in the boonies (i.e., not near a city
with air service) or they are extremely far-flung from each other
individually, there's a very good chance that your least cost location
is going to be listed in column 2 (and probably column 3).

Make a separate list of the cities in all of column 2, ordered by
decreasing order of the number of times the city name appears in
column 2. (So, the city appearing most often would go at the top of
the list.)

Now you start getting into gathering of data that is a little more
work-intensive - air travel expenses. I can't really advise you too
closely on *how* to collect this data, since I don't know whether your
company prefers a particular carrier or uses a particular travel
agency or uses online ticket booking sites.

However you do go about gathering the information, do the following:

* For each city in your ordered list of cities created above, find the
cost of air travel for each attendee from their home city to there.
This, of course, will vary depending on time of year, length of stay,
days of travel, coach/business class, etc.

* For each city in your ordered list of cities created above, perform
the following calculation:

location cost = sum of all airfares needed (for those not within 100
miles) +
                (number of nights * number of attendees needing
lodging * lodging per diem)

Once you have gone through all the cities on your ordered list, choose
the city with the lowest location cost. We'll call that the "first
candidate".

As I said above, there's a good chance this first candidate is going
to be the lowest cost location, especially if a decent proportion of
your attendees can save flight/lodging costs because it's close to
home.

However, if your attendees are widespread, then a more "central"
location might have a lower cost. A good way to find what "central"
location might be cheapest is to consider *major hub* airport centers
where many transfers on non-direct flights take place. Some of these
in the US include Chicago, Dallas, Memphis, and other midwestern
cities. A good way to determine which of these centers might be worth
investigating is to look at the flights found in the earlier part of
this process and see which, if any, of these hubs were frequently
listed as transfer points in those flights.

For each of these "hub" cities, the calculation is similar:

location cost = sum of all airfares needed + 
                (number of nights * number of attendees * lodging per
diem)

Even though all attendees need lodging, we must retain the lodging
cost in our calculations to insure that the location costs can be
compared to the earlier ones.

If any of these "hub" cities has a location cost lower than the
current first candidate city, then make the lowest cost city among
them the new "first candidate".

The last thing you might want to do is consider other "central" cities
that might not be major hubs. I suggest taking a map of the US and
putting pins in for each attendee, Then, see if any large cities (that
don't have a pin in them and aren't major hubs you've already checked
out) are near the geographic center of all those pins. For each such
city, the formula is the same as above:

location cost = sum of all airfares needed + 
                (number of nights * number of attendees * lodging per
diem)

Again, if any of these "geographic center" cities has a location cost
lower than the current first candidate city, then make the lowest cost
city among them the new "first candidate".

At this point you are done. Go with the current first candidate, your
lowest location cost.

As for how to perform the various calculations presented here, you
could do them on paper, with a spreadsheet, or however is most
convenient for you.

Please, if you need any clarification before you rate this answer,
please ask - I'm only too happy to help.

Happy travels!

websearcher-ga

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Clarification of Answer by websearcher-ga on 06 Aug 2002 09:15 PDT

Oh, as for search strategy, there really wasn't much searching
involved. This was more a problem of parameter clarification and
algorithmic thinking. :-)

websearcher-ga

Very good answer.  It helps a lot in working through the problem and
can be used repeatedly in the future.  Thanks.

Hi brianj: 

The short answer to this short question is that it's not as simple as
it might seem. There are an extra-ordinary number of variables
involved.

I have dinner guests coming in a few minutes, but if no-one else comes
up with a concise answer in the next couple of hours, I'll try writing
an "algorithm" for how you might go about forming the question, making
appropriate decisions, and calculating the cheapest option.

websearcher-ga

Hi Brian :


Before websearcher-ga comes with an well thought algorithm ( which
would be my approach if you would have posted your question in the
computer/software section ), please clarify if you are looking for

1. a one time solution for a specific problem
2. a repeatable solution (e.g. computer program )

If option 1 is the case, you would need to specify, at least, where
the participants are coming from ( search is different if participants
come from all over Germany into Munich than from all over the world
into the States.) I'm not telling the answer is different, but the
search is different.

Also some criteria for the "least cost" issue would be needed :

transport cost only
participants travel time also a cost ( all the same, or different
hourly rates)

A little clarification would help, specially before websearcher-ga and
his dinner guests finish their coffee.

Good luck,

Curepi

I have found that the cheapest way to have a meeting / conference with
people from everywhere is to do an online conference with an online
conference center like WebEx (www.webex.com) or PlaceWare
(www.placeware.com). How it works is the online conference center has
deals from one time meetings to "renting" space for a year. Each
person logs onto the website and is connected "live time" with the
other participants (or if you choose, you can be the omnipotent
presenter and they can merely watch) via the website as well as a
telephone conference. You can show live powerpoint presentation, use
white boards, live polling, and many other things. The web
conferencing vendor also provides all of the technical support you
will need. When you take hotel and airfare into consideration, not to
mention catering and event staff, the breakdown per person is quite
cheap. To get a better idea of how it works, check out their websites
and take the tours.

As far as pricing ballpark goes, lets say you have 10 people who need
to meet about once a month, all from different places, PlaceWare will
rent you online space at $750 a month. If you are still not convinced,
most vendors will let you participate in an online demonstration for
free.

Hi Brianj:

I did this often before I retired.  We had offices and personnel all
over the country.  It's not very complex and I did use a simple
spreadsheet.
For each person you would need variables like airfare and hotel
expenses.
I usually had a choice of 4 or 5 cities for the meetings. There are
many reasonable approaches, but I'd break the people by their
office(or their local airport) as columns in the spreadsheet.  The
rows would consist of the destination cities.  For each Office, there
would be a few columns per person consisting of airfare,
meals,lodging,incidentals(taxi,parking fees).  These 4 columns per
person would have data that depended on the Destination City row.
That meant that if the gathering was in a city where 5 employees
resided, those employees would show nothing for airfare, per diem,
incidentals as they were not on travel status, but local folk.
As soon as all the data was input, you just summed across the City
Destination Row to get the total expense for each Destination City.

It can also be done the other way, using the Destination City as the
column.

In may case, the spreadsheet was presented to management for
decisionmaking since intangibles exist which can't be handily placed
on the spreadsheet.
Intangibles such as a meeting in Jacksonville, Florida might be $1000
cheaper than one in Orlando, but afterhours Orlando might be much more
enjoyable for the people attending.

As far as data gathering, the secretaries in each office would gather
the relevant information for their people and email it to me for
inclusion in a spreadsheet.

Brad-ga