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I'd love to attend more conferences but as the author says it's too expensive to justify the cost in a majority of cases.

I did always wonder why they are so expensive. Are they the big cash cows we assume them to be? Or are they far more expensive to run than we think them to be?

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Have you seen how much hotels, conference centres charge for venue, beverages etc :)

Yes, but I've also seen how cheaply a number of other conferences/events are able to run in the same or comparable venues.

Can you give some examples please? If there are people out there who can run large conferences cheaply I'd love to go look and figure out how :-)

Don't forget wifi :)

I wish conferences offered two rates: one for just the talks, and one for talks + (coffee,wifi,lunch).

I was at a conference that did that. The end result was that there was no way to prevent people who hadn't paid for lunch and coffee from just walking up to the buffet table and taking lunch and coffee, and the food being gone before everybody who had paid for lunch had eaten.

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