Hotels
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Convention rooms
The hotel has to have enough convention rooms for your convention.
One of those has to be big enough to hold your largest events (typically opening and closing ceremony, next Swancon's launch, and the Masquerade). Many hotels achieve this by combining two or more smaller rooms into one larger room, using moveable walls.
You may require that some of these rooms are available to the convention 24 hours. Ensure that these rooms are sufficiently far from guest rooms (including vertically) that you will not annoy mundane hotel guests. You may require that some of your rooms to be secureable out-of-hours (e.g. the room you hold the Art Show in).
You will need audio/visual gear in at least one room, very likely two. One reason for this is that some AV presentations get a very large turn-out, and some are much smaller. If you have only one room kitted out for AV, then you have to put Great Nigerian TV SF Of 1953 in the same room you used for Neil Gaiman Shows Us Bits Of His New Mini-Series, which isn't ideal utilisation of space. If you have a multi-media stream, then you need two, very likely three rooms kitted out for AV. Dragging AV gear in and out of rooms really sucks.
Some hotels have all the convention rooms on the same floor, some not. Sometimes this is not a bug but a feature, e.g. if you wish to segregate panel items not suitable for minors away from the rest of programming. Sometimes you can use a hotel guest room with all the furniture removed as a convention room (e.g. for the Art Show).
Attitude
Swancon is an unusual convention in that almost all the delegates are paying their own way. Occasionally, venues do not understand this. We use the convention rooms more hours per day than many other conventions; some venues do not understand that when we say "24 hour", that means that we are planning to be singing loudly at 3am in one of the convention rooms. Room parties can be a little rowdy; some hotels listen when you tell them to book all the Swancon rooms in a block physically segregated from guest rooms occupied by mundanes. And some do not. When we find a hotel on our wavelength, everybody is happy; when people go in with incompatible expectations, there is less happiness.
Handicapped access
There are usually one or two wheelchairs at Swancon. Check that all of the convention rooms, at least one set of toilets and at least two of the guest rooms are handicapped-accessible.
Map
Most hotels will have a map of the convention facilities that you can take back to your committee to discuss. Height of ceilings, and size of doorways leading to rooms may be a factor for some program items, e.g. the Masquerade, so take a tape measure.
Negotiating
There are several aspects to price. The hotel may have a fixed price that they let the convention facilities out for; this may not be negotiable. But they may be able to negotiate in other areas. For example, they may be able to throw in free rooms for your guests, or do special deals for convention members at the hotel's restaurant. Another place rich for negotiation is the guest room rate. In the hotel industry, the standard rate given to people who walk in off the street is called the "rack rate". The next rate down is called the "corporate rate"; this is the rate given to business travellers, and is slightly cheaper. You should be able to persuade the hotel with no trouble at all to give you the corporate rate. With a little work, you may be able to get lower than this.
Logistics
The hotel may have a logistics area that you can use -- almost all hotels have a place to store suitcases of travellers who checked out this morning but haven't yet caught the taxi to the airport, and this space may be big enough for you to store stuff in just before and/or after the convention.
Lifts
It is traditional for lifts to fail during Swancons. One reason is that our conventions feature people frequently moving up and down floors to various programme items, and the lifts get a harder work-out than they are used to, and potentially overheat. Plan for the possibility.
