AREMA volunteers who’d worked reg- istration for the association for many years. “It was an enormous venture,” he said. “We had different badges for [dif- ferent classes of attendee]. Everybody had a different badge and different ac- cess to the event. Fees were charged for access, and we had to develop a system in which fees for organization X flowed down to organization X.” AREMA farmed out housing to Con- ferenceDirect. “One of the reasons we hired ConferenceDirect was we knew housing was going to be a zoo, ... and it was one of the best decisions we made,” Emely said. “They really helped us. We went from 13 hotels to 25. We couldn’t keep up with demand fast enough. We had hotels as far out as Bloomington. A lot of people were out of the block, and there were a lot of small blocks — 25 and 50 rooms, which were crazy to keep track of. Registration went reason- ably well, but if we had to do both hous- ing and registration it would have been a disaster.” On site, the Minneapolis Convention
Center assigned two event coordinators to Railway Interchange “due to the com- plexities involved in the show,” accord- ing to Jeff Johnson, the center’s executive director. “Each event coordinator was given two associations to work with. Each association had a separate pre-con- vention meeting, and then an overall pre-