I heard it got cancelled b/c hotel mgrmt found that someone damaged some stuff?

I hope whatever happened didn't jeopardize our chances of using that hotel again....

Yeah I heard someone broke into the pool, some good hotel room shows still took place though.

After what happened there at Fest 6 and they still allow Fest to use the hotel, I don't think it will effect next year.

For reals.
One of the greatest mysteries in my life is WHY IN THE WORLD Holiday Inn continues to house Festers. I understand they jack up the rates like mad, but still. People go out of their minds in that place and I don't know why they continue to put up with it.

Maybe, as a college town hotel, they are just completely unfazed by any student shenanigans.
Or maybe management is from Bosnia.

That is probably it. I just checked the website to see how much they charge on a random weekend...they are $85 for advanced checkin (which is when you pay in full on a credit card...which we do but is nonrefundable.) The refundable option is $129.

This year they were what, $170 a room. So they are making between 100% more to ~60% more on the room. And it guarantees a full hotel.

They can't be charged too much by the "security". Thats a lot of profit for one weekend that normally it'd be empty during.

My only bummer point is that every year we seem to be told there will be some special surprise for holiday inn guests, and it doesn't seem to pan out.

Hampton Inn next year, for sure!

So here's what happened:

We (Alternative Press and Asbestos Records) had assembled a hotel room show for Sunday night with Frank Turner, Mikey Erg and We Are The Union. Obviously we had planned on keeping it a secret initially, but when I got wind Sunday morning of the Punknews hotel room show from the night before that the hotel actually encouraged be moved to the lobby, I thought "Hey, maybe I run this by them and try to actually do the show wit the hotel's blessing."

So I talked with the day supervisor about it and she was 100% gung ho, saying as long as it was acoustic it shouldn't be a problem. (The other big selling point was that we'd be starting at midnight, not 2am like the night before.) So with the hotel giving us the thumbs up, we officially announced the show, and word spread like wildfire—plus more and more people came out of the woodwork wanting to play. Jeff Rosenstock, Franz Nicolay, Red City Radio... Basically, the thing was shaping up to be pretty huge. So I skipped out on Frank's 8 Seconds set and headed back to the hotel to make sure everything was still cool—which I quickly found out it wasn't. The night supervisor told me that once the manager came in that afternoon and saw all the damage done to the hotel, he said that we were absolutely not allowed to do anything.

I spoke with security for a long time about trying to do anything, scaling back the show to just a few acts or limiting the amount of people that could be in the lobby, or even doing it upstairs in the conference room or outside in the parking lot. They weren't having any of it, so I asked to speak to the manager. He came and talked to me, and was an INCREDIBLY nice guy. I can't state that enough. He and I talked for close to a half-hour trying to come up with some sort of solution, but what it came down to was he felt like his staff was endangered the previous night (I guess some people had pulled a fire alarm and when an employee tried to stop them, they shoved her into a wall), and he didn't have enough security on-hand to both be in the lobby for a large gathering and patrol the hotel hallways.

He repeatedly said he had no problem with the show itself nor the one on Saturday night, because it wasn't those people who vandalized anything—it was the people who ran rampant while the show was going on since security was in the lobby. I guess light fixtures were ripped off walls, elevators were drawn on, the bathrooms in the adjoining restaurant were trashed, and even the door handle to the hotel pool was ripped off.

So in the end he said it just wasn't in the cards to do something large-scale like this show was going to end up being. However, he gave me his business card and said to hit him up before next year's Fest so we can work out official-unofficial acoustic aftershows. Lemonade out of lemons, I guess.

towrads the question why they still let festers in the hotel: I think business... I guess with the higher rates they they right away have some money ready for minor repairs, I guess they charge the people if something was broken in a room, so in the end its a more stressful weekend for them but still a good one... maybe the insurance takes over some stuff as well... of course it seems like this year some more things got broken, which is uncool...

I don't think it's ever been as bad as it was during Fest 6—the hotel got DESTROYED that weekend. But there was a change in management at the Holiday Inn after that, and they've loved working with the Fest ever since. Like someone else pointed out, they charge double the going rate that weekend and make an absolute killing. They won't stop hosting guests.

That sounds like it would have been a beyond awesome bonus show too.

Who ended up playing room shows?

The Holiday Inn is the closest hotel to Ben Hill Griffin stadium. They deal with drunk asshats from out of town on a regular basis. I'm sure they've seen worse, say, the weekend of a Tennessee game.

That said, it's shitty that some people would randomly tear stuff up in the hotel. If it wasn't for that, they'd probably let us get away with all sorts of victimless crimes up in there.