Anthere wrote:
Best I can suggest is to prepare a *very* solid report for a city. Low costs, good accomodation, plenty of locals to help, funny nights, conference and sleeping at the same place... do all this, and you get a chance ! :-)
The main thing would probably be plane tickets, if anyone manages to come up with some great ideas or good pointers to cheap transatlantic tickets. This depends partly on when exactly the conference is and how the airline market fluctuates over the next six months or so, but in the one European vacation I've paid for (not counting family trips when I was a kid), the plane tickets accounted for around 75% of the total trip costs. It seems hard to find a transatlantic flight for under US$600 in the summer, and NYC-London is the only route that is even that cheap---most others are $800-$1100.
Of course, perhaps something exciting could happen in the international airline market in the next few months...
-Mark