The cheap accomodation is usually flooded well in
advance by foreign
students (summer schools, etc - the name sells very well) and the
university is quite good at squeezing money out of visitors.
Mind you, we managed MIT, so...
Not that the person with the Dunelm email address is at all biased. ;)
I imagine Oxford is one of the most expensive unis for holding
conferences in, simply because it's Oxford.
MIT has a strong interest in things like Wikipedia, so that probably
helped there. Oxford has no such interest...