How expensive will #SHRM13 Hotels be?

by Matthew Stollak on Wednesday, October 24, 2012



With the news today that hotel reservations are now being accepted for the 2012 SHRM Annual Conference, I bring you my 4th annual expose of SHRM hotel costs.

I look at selected SHRM conference brochures (i.e., the ones that I still possessed) over the past 13 years to see what it would cost a person to book a single room on a per night average.  Clearly, prices in 2001 will be different than in 2013, so I use an inflation calculator to adjust costs to today's dollars.  So, how does the 2013 Conference in Chicago compare to years past?

Cost of an Average SHRM-Affiliated Hotel (per night)
San Francisco (2001): $258.73 (standard deviation of $57.04)
Chicago (2008): $257.38 (sd of $29.63)
CHICAGO (2013): 248.49 (sd of 20.58)
San Diego (2010): $247.86 (sd of $42.66)
Washington DC (2006): $234.27 (sd of $40.25)
Philadelphia (2002): $219.58 (sd of $58.71)
San Diego (2005): $206.89 (sd of $50.45)
Atlanta (2012): $198.36 (sd of $22.13)
Las Vegas (2007): $168.68 (sd of $32.51)
Las Vegas (2011): $130.04 (sd of $18.04)

I ran a simple one-way ANOVA (i.e., a fancy way of comparing multiple means simultaneously) to see if there was a significant difference across the means of these 10 sampled years.  The results showed a statistically significant difference overall with F = 23.58 (p=.0000) with an R-squared of 38.48% (hence, nearly 39% of the variation in hotel costs can be explained by location).  The result is not surprising, given that San Francisco and Chicago is nearly twice as expensive as Las Vegas.

I also looked at hotel minimums (i.e., what is the cheapest hotel available through SHRM).  For 2013, the cheapest hotel is $195.  This is the 2nd most expensive minimum in these 10 years of data (only Chicago in 2008 outpaced it with a minimum cost of $202.23).

Clearly, attending the SHRM Annual Conference in 2013 will be a much more expensive proposition than in 2012.   Hotel costs in Chicago are approximately $50 a night more expensive than in Atlanta (and approximately $119 a night more expensive than in Vegas 2011).  The one saving grace? Given the 2nd smallest standard deviation in the sample, you will be able to find higher quality/higher rated hotels for not much more than the overall average/median.

With the conference tagline being "Bigger!"...SHRM really meant it when it comes to hotel costs!

See you in Chicago.

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