Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Chicago Is Going to Be Expensive, Part II: Chicago Is Still Going to Be Expensive

Those of you already on the PhD Bowling League mailing list (if you're not, here's the joining information) know that there's been a fair bit of discussion as to why student fees jumped from $125 for ACSP in Milwaukee last year to $295 for ACSP/AESOP in Chicago. My guess is that the fees are probably not going to come down. And even if they do -- well, there's still a price to pay to be in a very nice downtown area of a city enjoying a renaissance.

So here are my hastily-cobbled-together tips for minimizing the non-student-fee costs of Chicago:
  • Kayak.com and SideStep can both search many flight and hotel websites at once. Both also have a Search-by-Address option, so you can put in the address of the Marriott (540 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago IL 60611) and have the site return hotels nearby.
  • TripAdvisor has reviews of hotels. Take them with a grain of salt, though.
  • Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity all sometimes offer special deals (I think Hotels.com can as well) so if you're not having any luck at all, try doing separate searches. My Milwaukee reservation was an Orbitz deal. (Note: if you do this, and end up changing your schedule, getting refunded any extra days is not easy to do, since you have to go through the booking site, not the hotel.)
  • If you want to press your luck with Priceline: Bidding for Travel has lots of good advice as for bidding travel strategies. You will probably want to check Priceline's map -- it divides the city into "zones," and you are only guaranteed a hotel by zone, not by particular location. According to BfT's list of Chicago hotels, the Marriott is in the North Michigan Avenue - River North Area zone. Also, I believe Priceline bids are nonrefundable. If you want to get advice from the people on the BfT forum, read the forum guidelines very carefully before posting -- they have a particular format for communicating information about Priceline bids and they're sticklers for that format.
If anyone has Chicago-specific advice (say, the Chicago equivalent of Cheapo Vegas, which I have recommended to people attending APA this year), feel free to post them in comments.

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