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Nats 2020: January Update


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Nats 2020 – January Update

Greetings all…here with an update to what is now a quickly approaching National Convention. In 2019 we could all say “it’s not ‘til next year” but now that it is 2020 the convention will be here before we know it (well, at least for me, anyway). Here is a quick run-down of where we are in the planning:

Hotels: The Embassy Suites continues to be fully booked for the duration of the convention – all of the IPMS room block is full. There are still rooms available at the overflow hotels: Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Country Inn and Suites, and Candlewood Suites. I have started a wait-list for the Embassy Suites and as room reservations are cancelled by IPMS members this spring and summer I will work with the Embassy Suites to add wait-list members. I will follow-up with an e-mail to the member with instructions on how to verify your reservation with the Embassy Suites. If you desire to get on this wait-list please send me an e-mail: director.nats2020@gmail.com. Important: If you wish to cancel your reservation with Embassy Suites please e-mail me first! I will get you a cancellation confirmation number from our group room coordinator at the San Marcos Embassy Suites and it will keep the room from going “live” and able to go to the next person on the wait-list.

Vendors: We are about 90% full with vendor table reservations. There are still some tables left. Contact our vendor coordinator – Craig Gregory – at vendor.nats2020@gmail.com if you still desire a table(s). A current floor plan of all vendor locations is available on our website along with a list of all attending vendors (so far). In all, we are going to have 324 vendor tables at the convention.

Registration: We are in initial coordination with all the IPMS web store items for the 2020 convention, the most important of these is convention online registration. The team is shooting for March to have the convention registration open for purchase…along with all the related convention items (T-Shirts, tours, etc). We will still have walk-up registration available for those who are not registered by our deadline for online registration…most likely in June. We will post the actual deadline with the web store item when it goes live.

Convention Schedule: We have posted our initial convention schedule to the website. It will run similar to past conventions but on the first day, Wednesday, 29 July, we plan on opening registration at 10 AM and the vendor hall at 1 PM. The contest hall – with associated contest registration – will also open at 10 AM. The 3-hour buffer, we feel, will help with the rush to get registered before the vendor halls open to the membership in general.

Volunteers: While our target audience for volunteer positions is our local Texas clubs the positions will be open to anyone in IPMS across the country. There are links to our SignUpGenius pages off the main Nats 2020 home page (www.nats2020.com). While the team is still putting together a “thank you” for the volunteers we are leaning toward convention t-shirts for each of the volunteers. Details will be up on the website in the coming month or two.

Flying into the convention? We recommend that you fly into Austin, Texas. We will have a shuttle service arranged to get members from Austin-Bergstrom Intl Airport to the embassy Suites and all four overflow hotels on the first two days of the convention: Wednesday and Thursday. Once I finalize the schedule with the shuttle company in the next month or two, I will post it on the Nats 2020 website. I will be communicating with the shuttle company that I envision the shuttle(s) running from noon to about 9 PM each day.

Award sponsorships: Around the same time we have the web store items up on the IPMS web site we will have award sponsorship links live as well on the IPMS web store. We encourage all chapters across the country to sponsor a category. Links to these sponsorship items will be up on the Nats 2020 website soon.

Contest Categories, Rules, and Forms: We are expecting the updated 2020 contest categories and rules in a few weeks from Mark and Eileen Persichetti. Once I have these, I will post to the 2020 website. Contest forms are already available for download in PDF and Word format from the 2020 website. We will have hard-copy forms on-hand at the contest registration desk at the convention.

Theme Awards: The theme award for the 2020 National Convention will be The Six Flags Over Texas. Detail of the awards can be viewed here: http://www.nats2020.com/contest_pages/theme.html.

Seminars: We have an initial, draft seminar schedule set-up and ready to go. Once we finalize the seminar schedule I will post to the website. Expect this sometime in the early spring.

Tours: We are close to locking-in two tours: One for Thursday (July 30th) to The Alamo and San Antonio Riverwalk and one for Friday (July 31st) to Fredericksburg, Texas and the National Museum of the Pacific War (aka, the Nimitz Museum). We anticipate these tickets to go on sale with the rest of the convention items. If they sell out, we will look to add additional buses to each trip and then open up more tickets for sale.

As usual, if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me at director.nats2020@gmail.com.

In addition, on the staff page of the Nats 2020 website: http://www.nats2020.com/staff.html we have the e-mail of each of the department heads listed. If you have a specific question for one of those departments, I encourage you to reach out to them directly.

The Nats Planning Machine will continue to chug along and gain steam as we approach the summer.

~Model On

Len Pilhofer, IPMS #49932

Convention Chair,

IPMS/USA National Convention 2020

 

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Edited by LenPilhofer
Wrong date correction
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I too am looking forward to this shindig....and since me and my buddy may be pairing up (yet to see if we can talk our wives out of going...:smiley2: ) we may have a room to cancel between us since we both made reservations at the ES. Already in saving mode for the vendors area......

 

Gil :smiley16:

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