For the past few years, the TRAFFIC conference has been held at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The conference is coming up in a few months, and it will again be held at the Ritz Carlton October 20-23.

This morning, Rick Schwartz announced that the conference venue is changing beginning with the October 2014 conference. Citing an increase in business and activity in the domain space (both current and expected), the conference will be held at the  Fontainebleau Hotel, located in Miami Beach, Florida. The  Fontainebleau is a cool hotel with a ton of ballroom space, good restaurants, and nightlife venues.

Here’s part of what Rick had to say about the venue change in this morning’s email:

“Howard and I are positioning T.R.A.F.F.I.C., the show that MEANS
B.U.S.I.N.E.S.S., as the Intersection of all the domain-related shows to come. The
shift will be moving away from ICANN meetings as they become less relevant and towards the entrepreneur. The focus then becomes marketing and sales and not legislative.

This will spawn all types of splintered meetings, self promoting events and small groups and that makes doing business expensive and time consuming.

So with that in mind and hundreds of gTLD’s coming into existence that will require extreme marketing, Howard and I are proud to announce our 2014 and 2015 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. shows will be in a hotel that can handle the volume and size of what is coming.”

TRAFFIC will also be held at the Bellagio, presumably around the same time as this year’s conference, which was held in June.

It’s good to see Rick’s optimism about the domain space, and hopefully the busy summer will continue into the fall.

Here’s the full email Rick sent to TRAFFIC newsletter subscribers:

If you haven’t purchased your ticket for the TRAFFIC conference in October, now might be the time to do so. I received an email this morning announcing that the price per ticket increases from $1,195 today to $1,395 on Monday at 11PM.

Eventually, ticket prices will reach the final $1,995 price point shortly before the conference kicks off, although there will be a couple of price changes between the $1,395 and $1,995 price points if you haven’t decided yet.

TRAFFIC will be held in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida October 20 – 23, 2013. There is cabana networking at the hotel on October 18 – 19, 2013 for paid conference attendees. The Ritz Carlton Hotel

I’ll have a more comprehensive post about the TRAFFIC conference within the next couple of days, but I want to discuss the Bellagio as the TRAFFIC conference venue and make a few observations about Las Vegas as well. Overall, I thought holding the conference in Las Vegas was a very good idea, and I enjoyed being out there.

Until my late 20s (I am in my early 30s now), I had never visited Las Vegas. In the last 5 years, I’ve been to a couple of bachelor parties in Las Vegas, a long weekend with my wife, and now a business conference. For the sake of this discussion, you should probably know I enjoy spending time in the city of Las Vegas.

In my 3 prior trips, I had only spent a brief amount of time at the Bellagio. I went to Bank nightclub and did some gambling there. I found the hotel to be huge, which is good and bad for the sake of this conference. Let’s discuss…