Yeah. Y'know, they may not be able to talk about Flan refunds yet. Or lifetime pass refunds, or Neptune Noir refunds, or Booster Bash 2 refunds. Maybe they don't realize they need to consider refunds for the latter three.

But you'd think they'd realize their site's ... got issues. Let's just put it that way.

Boosters website has never been able to handle more than 5 visitors at once. And I wish I was being snarky there: I'm not. It's the worst website I've ever seen in terms of reliability.

Here's why I'm pissed off with Boosters: On Tuesday last week, they added somebody else to their business files and tried to obtain more credit (loans). Now, to be clear, they didn't have the money to run Flan initially, they said they obtained financing, and then right up until the last minute they've openly admitted they were apply and getting MORE loans.

Here's the thing: say they start refunding Flan holders. Great. Then there's all the other people... I can't see them ever putting on another convention with fandom people. So, how do they refund the other people when they couldn't afford to run Flan, let alone all the people who've got Booster Bash tickets, Neptune Noir, Life Time passes in advance?

They can't. But they've just got loans. So if they fold, the creditors (loan people) get first dibs on any remaining assets. And then any money left will go to the actual fans.

Or, put simply: I'm pretty certain Booster are going to bite the dust, and there's going to be fuck all left for anybody involved.

You know, I understand the recent timeline of events. But how did they get into trouble enough to need the loans to begin with? Was it just bad planning; the cons cost more than the fan revenue brought in? Or were they in the hole from previous events, and what the fans paid months ago went to pay off that?

Given their late cancellation date, I imagine they still owe the venue, event insurance, that sort of thing. The talent showed up for free, so I'm guessing although they probably owe appearance fees still, those won't get collected on.

It's just an odd sequence of events. I can't imagine that cancelling that late really saved them that much money. Where were they going to get the cash to pay off their loans? From tickets to future events? Where were they going to get the cash to run those events? Wonder what their profit margin was.

This is just speculation, however I'm willing to put my name to it: they have been loosing money since the first Flanvention.

The last few events they ran had a really top quality line of guests - example: Bruce Campbell - but they got extremely low attendance numbers. Many of the guests they were getting were really heavy hitters, so you're looking at well over $20,000 per guest in those cases. The last con they ran - which was a disaster in terms of paying customers - had *20* guests. After that con, Vicki - the person who seems to have resumed the website - posted on her Livejournal this: "Despite poor ticket sales, Booster Entertainment continues with it's history of never cancelling a guest".

What worries me is, if I ever lost my mind and decided to throw a party for, say, Drive, these asshats will make it harder for me to do that. Suspicion and all.

I'd just like to know how one manages to not have enough money to put on a sold-out con where everyone was paying a minimum of $250 a ticket. $125,000+ is a ton of money to just disappear into the ether.

The level of incompetence and asshattery involved in this whole mess is staggering.

X-posty, naturally.

Kalshane - it becomes even more scary if you work out the amount of money they made with other things (Lifetime passes - $25,000) along with unknown ticket sales for the forthcoming events. As somebody rightly pointed out, those events have tickets at over $800.

Interestingly, the last convention BE started selling, they no longer offered payment plans for customers. All tickets were up front payments. Wonder why. Additionally, the 'luncheon' tickets they sold for Flan 1 were for charity on ebay (Equality Now picked up the cheque), where as this year, they were sold on ebay, but not for charity. Additionally -- and people can see this for themselves -- if you go and fish out those ebay auctions, you can see people who claim to work for Booster openly bidding up those auctions. It doesn't get more dumb.

Really. I'm not sure I would want to see how much money BE have taken in the last year and compare to how much they have left. It'd make me want to punch things for the stupid factor involved.

Now, I know I don't go to media cons, and SF-lit cons are different animals, but, (a) the two cons I go to are in their 44th and 18th years, respectively and (b) neither of them costs more than $50 for the whole weekend.

Of course, the special guests appear for reimbursement of expenses plus cheez crackers, and the autographs are free.

Just, the amounts of money being discussed per person immediately turn on my gigantic alarm-bells. I gather that all media-related cons are much more expensive than book-related cons, because pretty people have an inherently bigger market than funnylooking people, but --? Are those prices typical?

I want to go to the cons Nutty goes to. Those are always fun .

The only way I can work out that cancelling at the very last possible moment saved them any money is if they never actually rented the venue at all and planned to cancel from the beginning.

They're becoming more and more typical. At a Booster event, they are paying for first class flights for the actors if they're at distance, hotel rooms for them and any guests, and an appearance fee of around $30,000 for somebody like Nathan (and it's about that for Adam and Alan). Plus the actors tend to take a good cut of the autograph and photograph fees.

What has happens isn't terribly complex. Con companies have been fighting over guests, and as a result at times they have got into a bidding war over them. It's been going on for many years, and it's pushed the prices right up. There's actually an agent out there for actors who's sole roll is to negoiate convention attendance fees, and funnily enough: he's very successful at what he does.

It's all about supply and demand, though. Flan 2 was a sell out. People are willing to pay those kind of prices, but it absolutely only works if you know what the hell you are doing.

Now, this isn't the case everywhere. For example, Sean Harry's conventions in the UK are a fuck of a lot cheaper and have a similar number of attendees. For his last convention, he didn't get all the cast. No Nathan. But it ran and it ran fine. That's because Sean understands business.