I'm not sure you can "right-size" if "right-size" means "significantly reduce cost and nobody is ever denied seating at major events." The costs offset each other.
Here's something that may not be obvious: Some of the stuff that is done at, say, BayCon, doesn't scale proportionately. There are certain sizes of SF conventions that just don't work well. 2,000 is okay. 10,000 can work. 4,000 is very troublesome.
This is a generalization, of course. Sometimes you can find a relatively inexpensive facility. Winnipeg, for instance, was just about ideal for the size Worldcon that was held there. In retrospect, the convention membership could probably have been $30 cheaper. (But we didn't know it during the run-up, resulting in a post-con surplus that ConAdian only finished discharging this past year.) But I'm not convinced that there's a lot of price sensitivity between $200 and $170. Even though $160 is the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what I paid in 1984, I still think the price point is somewhere around $100. And to make that kind of change requires some really significant differences.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying it would be very difficult. And if a Worldcon made those changes without having told people while they were bidding what they planned to do, they'd take a large goodwill hit. But any bid that admitted to planning such changes would be vulnerable to competition that said, "We'll stick to a traditional Worldcon." The people who vote on where Worldcons are held are the people who are least sensitive to changes in its price. The conclusion should be obvious.
no subject
Here's something that may not be obvious: Some of the stuff that is done at, say, BayCon, doesn't scale proportionately. There are certain sizes of SF conventions that just don't work well. 2,000 is okay. 10,000 can work. 4,000 is very troublesome.
This is a generalization, of course. Sometimes you can find a relatively inexpensive facility. Winnipeg, for instance, was just about ideal for the size Worldcon that was held there. In retrospect, the convention membership could probably have been $30 cheaper. (But we didn't know it during the run-up, resulting in a post-con surplus that ConAdian only finished discharging this past year.) But I'm not convinced that there's a lot of price sensitivity between $200 and $170. Even though $160 is the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what I paid in 1984, I still think the price point is somewhere around $100. And to make that kind of change requires some really significant differences.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying it would be very difficult. And if a Worldcon made those changes without having told people while they were bidding what they planned to do, they'd take a large goodwill hit. But any bid that admitted to planning such changes would be vulnerable to competition that said, "We'll stick to a traditional Worldcon." The people who vote on where Worldcons are held are the people who are least sensitive to changes in its price. The conclusion should be obvious.