Fangcon to move to new city and state

Draconis wrote:

Dear past, current and future attendees of Fangcon,

I hope by this time you may have heard of the difficulty we have been having with the hotel in Knoxville, TN. We attempted to secure a date with them for 2016 right after the con had concluded. The hotel put us off even though the local football schedule was already posted. We found out later this is what many hotels in the local Knoxville area do. They look for groups with bigger numbers so they can charge a higher price for the rooms (sometimes three and four times the amount we paid.) This year the football schedule only left a few open weekends for groups like ours.

Our hotel for Fangcon 2016 will be the Hilton Hotel, Perimeter Park Birmingham, AL. We know this will come as a disappointment to many attendees but this is the same issue we ran into after our first year of the con when we started it up in Nashville, it became too late into the year to find good options for hotel space. So it is either wait till 2017 and not have a con this year or make the best of it and see how well we do in Birmingham, Alabama. The con will be on the dates of Oct 27th through Oct 31st 2016.

We hit all the local hotels in Knoxville and the ones that either turned us down either were too costly for us,or hotel sleeping room cost was too high or had a no room parties or con suite rules.

The Airport Hilton strung us out for over a month. We even sent some of our local Knoxville staff there to check out the hotel. This ended up as we thought it might a TSA issue so no fursuiting outside a confined area of the hotel. For 2016 Knoxville is out. We tried Dollywood resort and they were too small for us meeting space wise. We ran into this quite a bit in other hotels also later on.

We checked back with Nashville and like years before the hotels there were booked. This also happened with Chattanooga too. We ran out of hotels in Central and Eastern Tennessee. We were able to get a lead on a hotel that would host us. It seemed like a long shot. But it also looked like it might be a good idea to host the con here for 2016 and then see about moving Fangcon to a different time of year in the Knoxville area. So with that said we have moved forward and are working toward a contact with a new location of our hotel. We were hoping to settle this contract before Furry Fiesta but contracts can be difficult. But it is getting close enough that we need to announce it so we can promote at TFF.

Now about the hotel. The Hilton Hotel, Perimeter Park is on the Southern Park of Birmingham. It is in an upper scale area so all that looks good. We have good terms on the contract so if the attendance takes a dip we should be able to weather the storm. We also have some perks but we will talk about those as they are worked out. We are making sweet lemonade out of the lemons were given.

Some attendees asked how we were going to top that RV fire we had last year. I think this is it! We can get through this and a still have a great convention. We are updating the Fangcon webpage so look for more information soon.

Thank you for your understanding.

Draconis, Con Chair for Fangcon