Billed as Europe’s leading B2B conference for the online entertainment industries, The European Summit (TES) 2011 was held in Prague, CZ at the Hotel Praha. While the show was said to last from September 20-23, that was stretching it. The show itself was really on the 21st and 22nd with some warm-up activities provided by YNOT and Cybersocket. I am not sure what, if anything, went on the 23rd. Most people were headed to London or Munich from what I could see.
The Venue
The Hotel Praha is huge. Sadly, there are only 136 rooms. If it was Las Vegas they would have made it into a 700 room hotel. In Prague they make the rooms very large. The result was inevitable, the show hotel sold out quickly. Several of us stayed at the Silenzio Hotel which was just down the hill. I know others stayed closer to downtown Prague. It seemed that attendees were pretty spread out, more than normal.
It was pretty obvious that the hotel and staff were not prepared for the influx of business at the bar. I arrived fairly late Monday evening after traveling from Amsterdam. There were several of us that had the same thing in mind, and that was food. The front desk told us there was none to be had in the hotel and no one knew of much other than a KFC that would be open past 10:00 PM. I opted out of the KFC option and discovered that there was some food that could be ordered at the bar. What they failed to mention was that the bar only had a very limited number of beers in stock. That was gone in a flash. Yes, they had other alcohol available, but I really wanted a beer. (more…)
