I‘ve been playing a bit with Groovy and I‘ve attended a Grails presentation done by Guillaume Laforge back in January. I thought it was really good and when he mentioned the Grails conference in London I thought “Let’s go! The conference is in May, just during my birthday, I love London, I have plenty of friends there, it would be a good oportunity to know a bit more about Grails, meet people at the conference and have some English and Irish beer” . Recently the registration opened and to my surprise I saw that the first International Grails eXchange 2007 conference is at 1000 euros (700£). I compared the price with the conferences in the near future and this is what you can get for a 3 days conference: 1350 euros ($1795) to go to TheServerSide Java Symposium-Europe in Barcelona, 1694 euros to JAOO, 1742 euros to QCon or 1350 euros ($1795) to Java One. Plus travel and hotel costs obviously. I can’t believe JavaPolis was only 200 euros for such a good conference. Is there a reason why JavaPolis, a huge Java conference (2800 participants in December), was at 200 and the first Grails conference is at 1000 ? I know London is an expensive place, the Barbican center must charge quite a bit, but why are IT conferences so expensive in general? Stephan Janssen, can you tell us your secret?