Preparing An OAH Annual Meeting

Lee W. Formwalt and Amy Stark

In the wake of the annual meeting, members often ask the perennial questions: Why does OAH have to meet in such expensive hotels, especially when AHA is able to get much cheaper rates? Why doesn’t OAH refer its members to less expensive nearby hotels as options? Why don’t we meet in more mid-sized cities than in the large metropolitan centers like Boston and San Francisco? Why do all the good sessions (i.e., the ones I’m interested in) get scheduled opposite each other in the same time slots? Why do the popular sessions get assigned to small and thus overcrowded rooms and the sessions with smaller audiences get located in cavernous halls? Why do you have sessions on Sunday when many attendees are already on their way to the airport? Why do you have offsite sessions, which seem to discriminate against the presenters on such panels? Why aren’t there more Focus on Teaching sessions aimed at high school, middle school, and elementary teachers? And why don’t you have more traditional history sessions instead of focusing on, what one attendee called, the “Holy Trinity of Race, Class, and Gender?”

We have a good sense of our members’ concerns since approximately one-quarter of those attending the annual meeting responded to our brief sixty-second survey they found waiting for them on their return from the convention. We asked attendees to rate the content of the program, the facility, and the other events and services offered by OAH at the meeting. We also asked for additional comments and nearly two-thirds of those responding provided them.

Since many of these questions concern the annual meeting site selection process, we decided to share with you some of the various factors we consider when choosing a site for the OAH convention. The last three conventions (Washington in 2002, Memphis in 2003, and Boston in 2004) have brought together 2,500 or more historians and others interested in American history and provided an exhibition hall with more than 100 booths. While the size of a facility is important, it is not the only factor involved in determining the location of the meeting.  

The OAH meeting staff typically spends six to twelve months researching a potential site for the convention. In 2002, the OAH Executive Board decided that the meeting location should follow a four-year rotation around the country—Washington, D.C., Central, Northeast, and West. For a given region, any possible annual meeting host city must offer adequate air, taxi, and other public transportation, as well as adequate facility space at reasonable rental rates. The potential host city must also have a significant number of community colleges, universities, and public history sites within driving distance. OAH staff members consult local OAH members and local chapters of organizations like the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, and the Human Rights Campaign to determine the venue’s suitability and its history of race and labor relations as well as other types of discrimination. We ask the convention and visitors bureau to provide information about the safety of the area around the meeting venue and the availability of nearby restaurants, shopping, and cultural attractions. The venue must prove its compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, disclose its antidiscrimination policy and union representation, and, most important, provide an adequate number of sleeping rooms (900 on the largest night) or have a relationship with another venue to provide overflow rooms. 

Once a city and venue have been chosen, negotiations begin. Large convention hotels are more likely to provide complimentary or very low cost meeting room rentals, while convention centers tend to charge much more for the use of their space. The trade-off is that large hotels often require a higher sleeping room rate, while the use of a convention center usually allows OAH to use a variety of hotels at different rates. In order to offset the high cost of meeting rooms in a convention center, many of the convention hotels in a small city will add a fee to each attendee’s sleeping room rate, which is then passed on to the convention center. Negotiations with a hotel must result in a significant reduction off the hotel’s projected “rack” room rate. In Boston, for example, we were able to negotiate a 37 percent reduction from the rate offered to the general public over the dates of our meeting. It is also important that a venue is willing to negotiate the cost of ancillary services, which allows OAH to keep attendees’ registration costs low. 

The selection of a venue and the room rate that OAH offers attendees has been an issue of concern for several years. Two years ago, the OAH surveyed its members to determine if the time of year in which OAH hosts its meeting (typically March or April) should be changed to the summer or fall to take advantage of lower-occupancy times and thus lower hotel rates. Most members responding to the survey preferred to retain spring as the best meeting time. A large majority, however, did indicate that a change in the days of the meeting would be acceptable. Based on this response, OAH negotiated a lower room rate for its Washington, D.C., meeting in 2006 and New York meeting in 2008. Instead of the usual Thursday to Sunday schedule, the D.C. meeting will begin Wednesday and end Saturday, while the New York convention will open Friday and close Monday. 

OAH continues to investigate other options for future meeting sites. We are researching smaller, less expensive cities in the Northeast, West, and Central regions. Over the last several years we have considered a mix of cities of different sizes, including Long Beach, Spokane, Albuquerque, and Houston, as well as San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Phoenix. Research on various cities in the last few years has shown that smaller cities are not necessarily less expensive. Oftentimes, the savings on the hotel room rate are offset by the higher cost of airfare and ground transportation. Airfares to smaller cities can be as much as $160 higher than airfare to major metropolitan airports over the same dates. Meetings in smaller cities with several hotels can also be a hardship for attendees who have difficulty walking long distances or in cities where mass transit is not available. In keeping with our members’ wishes OAH does offer a mix of large and smaller cities. Between Washington in 2002 and Boston in 2004 we met in Memphis. Similarly, between Washington in 2006 and New York in 2008, we will meet for our 2007 centennial convention in Minneapolis.

OAH is working with several sponsors, including the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, to provide travel grants to precollegiate teachers, graduate students, and international scholars. Our next round of requests to convention bureaus will ask facilities to provide proposals with fewer sleeping rooms in the main hotel. This approach might allow for a smaller block of lower cost rooms at a nearby hotel, but will require OAH to incur increased fees for renting meeting room space. We have negotiated a hold on sleeping room rates below $200 a night for the annual meetings through 2010, and plan to continue working with members and meeting venues to provide cost-effective and interesting host cities for the annual meeting. 

OAH contracts with hotels ensure that sleeping rooms will be available to attendees. The hotel provides space and services based on the number of total rooms OAH contracts. If we do not fill our contracted block of rooms, the hotel is able to bill OAH directly for the unfilled rooms. Failing to fulfill this part of the contract could result in tens of thousands of dollars in charges to the OAH. Our contracts with hotels usually obligate OAH to advertise only the headquarters hotel in our promotional materials until it completely sells out of rooms. However, if a member contacts the OAH office, we are usually able to provide information about alternate hotels within walking distance or accessible by public transit. No attendee is required to stay in the official convention hotel, but to do so is more convenient and it does help insure that OAH will not have to pay for unfilled rooms in our block.

Oftentimes, members tell us that they were able to find lower-cost hotel rates at nearby hotels. Many hotels will reduce their rates at the last minute, sometimes at a substantial discount. Hotels consider room nights perishable and will often sell them below cost to see at least a small return. Waiting until the last minute to secure a hotel room is risky, however, because often OAH is not the only convention in the area and hotel rooms may sell out all over the city.  

Because the AHA annual meeting is usually the week after the New Year’s holiday—a very slow time in the hotel and convention industry—that association is able to secure cheaper rates. In January, many venues would remain mostly empty if no convention were scheduled, so AHA is able to offer substantially lower rates than in the more popular convention months of March and April. 

Members also express concern over the scheduling of sessions at the convention. The OAH staff works closely with the program committee to spread more than 150 sessions across the ten time slots at an annual meeting. Despite our best efforts it is inevitable that some sessions in the same field will be scheduled opposite each other, especially if there are more than ten sessions in a particular area (e.g., twentieth century or race). The number of attendees drawn to a particular session is often difficult to predict. The program committee cochairs and OAH staff attempt to determine which sessions will draw the largest crowds and assign them to the largest rooms. But as one member surmised, it is basically a crap­shoot. This year, the state of the field sessions proved more popular than ever, so every effort will be made to assign them larger rooms in San Francisco next year. We expected a large turnout for sessions on integrity in the profession and guns in early America, yet neither drew a large crowd.

As the size of our meeting grows, the necessity of Sunday sessions increases. This year for the first time, we scheduled two sets of sessions for Sunday morning to accommodate the large number of panels in Boston. Every effort is made to insure a similar mix of sessions in all time slots so that no time slot is privileged over another in terms of quality of presentations. As members recognize the need for Sunday sessions, we hope they will schedule their departing flights on Sunday to accommodate that.

Offsite sessions have always generated debate over whether the unique location of such sessions enhanced the presentation or limited the audience size. Once again, in Boston, some members cheered the offsite location of some sessions, while others blamed the low turnout at other sessions on the panels’ removal from the hotel. Overall, it appears that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and next spring in San Francisco the 2005 program committee is considering an entire afternoon of offsite sessions with no panels scheduled in the conference hotel.

As we draw more elementary, middle, and high school teachers to the annual meeting, it is imperative that we provide more Focus on Teaching sessions for those practitioners. We encourage elementary and secondary teachers to submit proposals for such sessions as soon as the call for presentations for the 2006 annual meeting in Washington appears this August. OAH has recognized the need for teaching sessions for all levels of pedagogy from the elementary school to the university. Advanced high school and freshman and sophomore college survey teachers can often take advantage of the same type of teaching session. But we need to think more creatively about how professional historians can assist their colleagues at the K-8 level.

Finally, OAH faces the perennial complaint of annual meeting sessions focusing too much on race, class and gender and neglecting sessions devoted to the more traditional fields, such as military, economic, and diplomatic history. Despite the efforts of some to erroneously paint this as a deliberate effort of a left-leaning association to promote topics that would appeal to our mostly liberal members, it should be noted that the OAH annual meeting sessions reflect the current scholarship in the field. When few, if any, sessions are proposed in more traditional or underrepresented fields, the executive office has gone out and solicited panels in such areas as military or early American history in an effort to be as inclusive as possible. It is critical that members practicing in all fields of American history submit proposals to the program committee. With few or no proposals in certain fields, it is difficult to have sessions in those fields on the program.

Producing an annual meeting involves many long hours and tremendous effort on the part of numerous volunteers, especially members of the program and local resources committees, as well as the entire staff of the executive office. With the success of a meeting like Boston, we know that it is truly worth the effort.

Lee W. Formwalt is OAH Executive Director and Amy Stark is OAH Director of Meetings.