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CES Vendors Kicked Out of Hotels For Showcasing Wares in Room
An anonymous reader writes to mention that a number of companies attempting to stretch their dollars by showing their new gear in hotel suites around Vegas during CES were kicked out of the rooms they paid for by CES organizers and hotel staff. According to sources as many as 30 small electronics companies may have been kicked out of The Venetian and The Palazzo on Thursday. One anonymous vendor claims they were coerced into paying $10,000 to the CEA lest they be kicked out of their (paid for) suite and barred from exhibiting or meeting with clients. 'States our source, "I asked the hotel staff if there were any limitations for using the suite. They said the only limitations were how many people were at our parties. They didn't say there were any limitations on displaying product. We set up our product on the first day. Then on Wednesday a cleaning person came in and reported what they saw to management. From there we got kicked out on Thursday."'
I mean I'm not a show vendor and I even know that doing such things is not ok with hotel management.
To sum up TFA:
1. CEA buys out Vegas for a week, attracting technology enthusiasts and large companions from across the globe.
2. Said organization is holding the balls of local buisness so tight, that they must bend over to anything the CEA demands.
(In this instance it was having The Venetian, The Palazzo kick out small/medium tech buisnesses who couldn't afford a CES floor spot onto the streets unless they paid the hefty fee of $10,000)
3. ???
4. Profit!
Another evil coorperation fucking over the little guy, nothing to see here folks.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Vendors have been showing their products in hotel hospitality suites for decades. I've never been to any trade show yet where this wasn't the case. I don't know what the hell CES management is thinking if they consider this any kind of a problem.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Wi-fi and tables are available at the bookstore but they don't expect you to run your business, host clients, create displays on the tables (seen this done before!). CES and Vegas in general benefit from having a formal process and presenteres paying a fee and going through a process. Of course the hotel (and Vegas and CES) wouldn't want this.
AVN holds the porn convention at the same time in vegas. do they have the same rules about not working in your rooms? maybe the demo was a rogue AVN guest and not CES?
Probably scared the crap out of the DRM mafia.
I guess they really want to tighten up their grasp at other companies money.
I've always heard about these types of 'parties' from all the shows, especially CES and EEE.
Even Microsoft and Sony (among many others) do these for some stuff.
The smaller vendors have utterly relied on being able to do this.
Having a small booth in a 'busy' place like that can make it really hard to do a presentation of your product, not to mention restricting access when you want to keep it limited.
Seems a bit odd (or greedy) for them to start cracking down on it now.
The CEA can institute whatever rules it wants on its own show property, but it has no business or right to interfere with anything (ahem) going on in local Las Vegas hotel rooms.
Similarly, unless the hotel informed them of some restriction, and as long as they abided by all of their usual rules, they have no basis for throwing them out, at all. I hope these companies fight this. At the very least, there's remedy in small-claims action. And obviously they should dispute any credit card charges from the hotel.
They're probably desperate from the declining numbers, and revenue, and are in financial trouble.
Monopolistic practices. Interference with trade. Lost and unrecoverable revenue opportunities. General fuckedupness.
CEA probably could have saved a lot of grief by warning these vendors ahead of time that it was going to do this sort of thing. Sure a number of the vendors would have worked around the rules, but that'll happen next year despite the crackdown. The vendors will just be a bit more clever.
Further, this just reeks of bad communication and incompetent handling by CEA and the respective hotels. If I were involved with the decision, I'd be worried about breech of contract suits from the affected vendor firms. Just from my extremely crude reading of the article, this doesn't sound like CEA or some of the hotels did due diligence in upholding their side of the exhibition contracts.
Finally, these sorts of antics show up when an organization is tight on money and starts ignoring long term costs and harm. One wonders if the CEA will go bankrupt in a few years.
... no competition is allowed ;-)
I had to read this at least three times to figure out they meant "wares" not "warez".
I was thinking, video game modchips and rom images, or torrented movies playing in the hospitality suite?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've seen this happen with Siggraph. The contract that Siggraph had with the hotels said that no vendor suites would be allowed for display of products or meetings with actual or prospective customers without explicit written permission from Siggraph management. All vendor suites had to be booked through Siggraph.
In, I think 1994, several vendors had such suites and publicized them at the exhibition. Siggraph management charged the hotel the standard suite fee for each of those vendor suites. Collected it too. I don't know if the hotels managed to get it back from the vendors or not.
We are proud to announce that we will be holding a similar event in Lost Springs, WY and that there will be absolutely no restriction on what participants may do. Also, the fees we are going to charge will be ridiculously low compared to what it costs in Vegas.
Stay tuned for updates.
You can look here for directions :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Springs,_Wyoming
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Lost+Springs&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.252269,72.158203&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Lost+Springs,+Converse,+Wyoming&ll=42.863886,-105.314941&spn=0.93208,2.254944&z=9
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I'm guessing they got more for turning the guests in than they would have for cleaning the rooms for a couple of days.
mmmm...forbidden donut
Using the premises for an unlawful purpose or act
My bet is that Las Vegas zoning code specifically restricts commercial activity from hotel rooms themselves. I've never looked at the Las Vegas zoning code, but I have looked at the codes in my area of the country -- and hotels are only allowed to have certain activities in certain areas of the hotel.
Commercial activity in the rooms themselves is verboten in every code I've seen (about a dozen), although again, I've never looked at the Las Vegas zoning code (or any other Las Vegas laws that might or might not apply, including laws on lodging houses of various kinds, health codes, etc).
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Your rights ______ ?
Offline.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
...CES 'kicked people out of hotel suites' is patently delusional. The hotels kicked them out. Random people cannot kick people out of hotel rooms.
Whether or not the hotels can do that is a separate point. You cannot just randomly kick people out of their rooms for no reason.
While a lot of you are talking about 'changing agreements' after the fact, I'm not entirely certain hotels could actually dictate the purposes for which you could use a hotel room even with a contract in advance.
Everyone assuming this is a simple matter of contract law needs to look up 'innkeeper statutes'...people who operate hotels cannot just randomly make whatever rules and regulations they want about residents, even in advance.
If I walk up to a hotdog vender, and want to buy a hotdog and have the money, and he doesn't like my hat, he doesn't have to sell me a hotdog. Normal businesses can refuse service to anyone except for specific reasons.
If I want up to a hotel, however, and have the money, they do have to give me a room if they have one, unless they think I'm going to use it for some unlawful purposes. Hotels are not like other businesses, they're not even like apartments...they are considered public accommodations, and the reasons you can refuse service are only the reasons specifically outlined in law.(1)
There are a lot of other regulations about what 'innkeepers' can, and cannot, do. For example, in most places, they can't actually disallow non-renters from visiting a renter who authorizes them. Your parties have to obey fire code, and cannot be disruptive, but that's it.
I know a lot of people assume 'Companies can do anything as long as they say it advance', but 'innkeeping' is actually heavily regulated.
Casinos in Vegas have, for exactly this reason, a clearly defined area that is 'the hotel' (Where innkeeping laws hold sway), vs. 'the casino' (Where gambling laws hold), vs. the rentable floor areas (Which are just like renting a warehouse or something) vs. the rest of the building (Which falls more under the 'mall' part of the law, being open to the public.)
Oh, and some people may be unaware...The Venetian and The Palazzo are the same building. They are two hotels next to each other, with one casino in the middle of them, and one (huge multi-story) exhibit area behind the casino, along with a bunch of other stuff back there like the Blue Man Group theater. (I stayed at the Venetian once.)
1) Someone's about to say 'Hey, didn't hotels used bar unmarried couples from staying, and to have 'house detectives who attempted to make sure that people weren't using hotels for affairs?'. Yes, and having sex outside of marriage used to be illegal, making that being 'using a hotel room for unlawful purposes', until the Supreme Court struck those laws down, and hotels had to stop.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Since I am not a lawyer, take all this with a block of salt.
It's all about the room contract. I assume the room contracts were between the small companies and the hotel. If so a review of the contract is in order.
It's possible that CEA had a contract with the hotel, but unless the hotel rewrote the contracts the small companies signed it's still a moot point.
It's also possible that CEA bought blocks of rooms (not reserved, purchased) and sold them directly to the small companies. If so the contracts between CEA and the small companies are probably in force. A good reading is still in order as it's hard to tell if there's anything in there about it.
If the contracts don't go your way then you might consider getting into he said / he said with hotel staff. And get out your wallet.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
History repeating?
This has been common business practice for a really long time at most trade shows I went to in Vegas in the 90's.
The trade show producer doesn't offer a way for smaller companies to get into most shows. Even if they did, a good idea would be knocked off in months in most cases.
Smaller vendors don't have the budget for a booth and meet their customers anyway they can. It's hard to blame them.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Is anyone REALLY surprised? This is the place that embraces the exploitation of others. If you don't want to get shaken down then don't go to Vegas. I sure as hell don't.
Try tipping the cleaning staff and maybe they'll keep their mouths shut.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
It's just as common as not, at least from my experience, as full time trade show worker for fifteen years before I semi retired back to farming. I have helped set up displays and product and arranged tables of literature and swag in any number of hotel rooms before, with the main action down in the exhibit halls or in the larger conference rooms, and I have always known it to go on and really..vendors meeting with clients in hotel rooms? Oh hey, look, I have the widget we are selling right here in my case... This is as common as anything, all over the planet, like as long as there have been hotels. A lot of times people make some contacts then they go back to the more private rooms to work out deals, etc, and they might still be looking at the products then. It just widely varies, and unless the show management and the hotels actually denied this practice in advance, and they can prove it, those folks got at least semi shafted. (guessing based on lack of more detail in TFA, it is all hearsay. Even if it was just coattail riding and they paid ces nothing, they still paid the hotel, and the hotel should have that restriction in some contract and be upfront about it in advance.)
I have stayed at the Venetian/Palazzo many times. When you check in, there is a four page agreement that appears on a little LCD screen that you have to sign. It specifically says you agree not to display merchandise or conduct business in your suite.
So this entire thread is in the category of Whining.
If nothing else, the companies that booked directly with the hotels and were not getting CES/CEA special rates should be able to initiate chargebacks (because odds are high it was all paid for on someone's credit card). They contracted for a service, that service was aggressively not delivered.
The drawback to this is the possibility of not being able to book into the same hotel in the future, at least not under the same name. Similarly, if the hotels share information (any legal issues with that?) possibly being effectively blacklisted from that whole area of Vegas.
If you want to get lawyers involved, there may be other claims as others have pointed out, but that probably gets more risky and potentially expensive.
fencepost
just a little off
Should be easily dealt with in court.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it