We are excited to have 3400 members participate in this year’s AHA National Homebrewers Conference! We certainly were not thinking we would have that many attendees when we booked the space in 2010. Thankfully we were able to work with the host hotel and the attached convention center to give us the room we needed to nearly double our attendee capacity from the 2012 conference.
Part of the solution to allowing more attendees was the Full Conference…Almost registration option which includes everything, including all of the Thursday social functions, but does not include the Thursday seminars (we have half the space for seminars on Thursday that we do for Friday and Saturday). This also give judges a less expensive option, knowing that they won’t be able to participate in the Thursday seminars, all of which will be repeated later in the week.
We have also added additional overflow hotels that are in the immediate vicinity of the host hotel at or below the original group room rate, and have lined up additional hotels that can be added as needed. See
http://www.ahaconference.org/hotel-travel/hotel/ for booking info.
You likely can imagine our dismay (we knew those trying to register were dismayed!) when the AHA websites went down almost instantly upon launch of conference registration. The site locked up due to an error on our host provider's part. We were able to disseminate the direct link to the registration system via social media while working with the server host to get the website back up.
I am looking forward to seeing so many of you at what will be by far the largest National Homebrewers Conference ever—1500 more attendees than the previous attendance record.
Gary