Read more in this series here.

Now that I had a name and date for the party, I had to find a location. This would be difficult, I knew, but not for the reason I thought. I originally was concerned that hotels wouldn’t want a kinky party at their location, but actually most hotels didn’t care. They cared that I hadn’t done the party before, so they couldn’t guarantee the rooms they’d be blocking off would be sold, and they couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t cancel the event on them. Not that I would, but I understand their point of view.

I started with the Sheraton Atlanta Downtown (now the Courtland Grand), which is the host hotel for Frolicon. They have a massive kink convention there every year; why wouldn’t they say yes? As it turns out, in order to have my event there, I’d have to guarantee I could sell out all 793 rooms of the hotel, which was highly, highly unlikely — the largest spanking party in the US is TASSP and they’re usually in the 300-400 attendee range. Frolicon had 2200 attendees last year. After the Sheraton, I tried the Sonesta down by the Atlanta airport, home of the Leather Leadership Conference for the past couple of years; they also said no.

Okay. Fine. Let me just pull up a list of hotels that has rooms for $200/night or less and start going through all the ones near the airport. I filled out a lot of forms — hotels now have automated systems where you can put in your event information and they can then decide if they want you or not — and got a lot of negative responses. In fact, every single affordable hotel in the airport area said no.

So did most of the ones downtown — one of the Hyatts said yes, but they also required a minimum spend of $100,000, and some back-of-the-envelope math put my budget at less than half that.

Next I tried the Cobb Galleria area, and the Perimeter area; no dice.

I finally got a few people to say yes; one was an Embassy Suites near my house, although they required me to sell out the entire hotel, which would be just under 200 rooms. One was a Doubletree where the sales manager said yes but her boss said no. One was a Crowne Plaza up in Gwinnett county that seemed like a great fit, but they were concerned about the noise because the hotel has an open center atrium from the first floor all the way to the roof. I even tried the hotel in Roswell that has done swingers’ party takeovers before, but they said no.

Eventually, I found two hotels that were willing to host us: the Doubletree in Roswell and the Marriott in Alpharetta. Neither was ideal; they weren’t easy to get to via mass transit (though, to be fair, unless you’re going to the airport, a Falcons game, or State Farm Arena, mass transit doesn’t really go anywhere helpful in Atlanta). But they were willing to talk to me, and willing to take a chance on our event.

The first hotel I checked out was the Doubletree. It had a very nice convention space, and it could fit my estimated 300 attendees (I was aiming high), and it had a couple of suites we could use for hospitality, but not every room had a refrigerator and the room block rate would be $180/night. Given that the room block rates for the Texas parties are usually $110 or lower, I didn’t feel too good about that.

The second hotel was the Alpharetta Marriott. It’s a smaller hotel in a business area, but the sales manager was perfectly fine with what we were doing and she — and the hotel manager — was willing to take a chance on us. We corresponded for a couple of weeks, and then set up a time where I could go in and meet her, as well as check out the location and see what I had to work with.

Next time: negotiating the space.