Okay, I must say that after a few years of lowered expectations
*cough* Britannia *cough* the current venue has been up to considerably better standards (well, as far as you get them in the UK anyways
).
The con staff's been doing a fair job (I hardly saw any of them until the last day, which is normally a good sign) and there's hardly anything to add that hasn't already been mentioned.
Since I work Con Ops for That Other Con[tm], I've got Con Ops Eyes even when it's Not My Con, Not My Fault, Not My Problem[tm], and whenever I saw a potential issue in the public spaces (creases in the red carpet, anyone?) I found it to be resolved soon afterwards. That, and I guess your ConOps team now knows why you don't use Gaffa tape on carpet...
There's two minor grumbles I have with the con though; first, setting up the queues for the stage shows in the main corridor led to unneccessarily narrow passageways at times, especially since people had a tendency to just stand around in doorways and chat at the junction between the two corridors in the function space.
Secondly, for those members of staff who communicate with attendees it'd be nice to tone down the level of sophistication in con communication a bit. Con communication has been written in such a formal style that it's been hard to read if you're not a native speaker of English - heck, I've seen things that made me scratch my head and re-read them twice, and I've got a Grade A Cambridge certificate mounted on my wall.
So, please don't write stuff like "The Convention is proud to announce that after long and exhausting talks with the Hotel it has been prospected that on the premises of the Hotel whilst conducting business a venue has been set aside in the Brasserie meeting room where the Hotel in conjunction with the Convention will be holding an all-you-can-eat buffet of a great variety of choice that will be prepared by the Hotel's master Chef each day of the week to be enjoyed by you from the hours of 6.30 am to 11.00 am as the Convention has secured a special deal with the Hotel ensuring maximum breakfast enjoyability to improve your Convention experience by having luxurious foods such as undercooked sausage, shavings of bacon, and inclusive toast, whilst the Convention would like to remind you that thermonuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, or any other items of similarity are not permitted anywhere near the designated breakfast venue, as per the Agreement with the Hotel", but rather write "Breakfast will be from 6.30 to 11.00, don't bring nukes" as it will make your messages easier to decipher for us poor foreigners.
Speaking of The Hotel (which, for some reason, is capitalised... British English is odd at times.):
Two more things.
a) my room got overly and awfully hot during daytime. I do realise there was a "hot" spell (if you can call 23 degrees hot, which it really isn't, unless it also is humid) - but the fact that the windows did open just a mere 3 centimetres did very little to ventilate the room, so it was fucking sweltering in there by lunchtime. Apparently there was a way to bypass these stupid safety clips (as I could see on the other wing), but I didn't find out how. Had this happened in my native country and at paying a full rate, I would've been down to reception moaning about it... but I really couldn't be arsed to deal with that in Health & Safety-insane UK. Should've booked an airconditioned room, maybe, but then I heard from a friend the aircon in their room wasn't all that well either. Can you bring multitools into the UK without getting arrested for having a knife?
b) The breakfast buffet. Admittedly the cooked buffet was rather nice for UK standards (I've seen far worse, like the Manchester YHA), but the Continental buffet just.... disappeared when the con was running, and magically reappeared on Late Departure day. All you could get during the con was toast with... erm, sixty different flavours of jam. I don't really like jam.
