Should I stay or should I go?

09 Jan 2007 By

Okay, so I was thinking about this whole SXSW Interactive thing. Can I afford the festival pass? Can I afford a plane ticket? Can I afford accommodations?

Frankly, no idea how much hotel would run. I know you can purchase accommodations right when you buy your festival pass, but I haven’t peeked far enough into that process to see what the rates are. I’m wondering how hard it’s going to be to find accommodations on my own. Although I just now remembered that I have a friend that lives there.

Festival pass, I can make that work. It’s $275 until this Friday, $300 until Feb 9, and $350 after.

The plane ticket is the wild card. My mom and sis will be visiting here in a few weeks, but that’s only if I can come up with plane tickets for them. Roundtrips from Detroit to here are running $200. Not too bad. $160 if I spend 10,000 miles on a Cash & Miles ticket. Tickets to Austin are running $320. Or they’re freely available at the moment for 25,000 miles.

I only have 32,000 miles in my account right now. So for 2 DTW-MSP tickets and 1 MSP-AUS ticket, it looks like my options are either $640 + 20,000 miles, or $400 + 25,000 miles. No brainer.

Must put in for vacation immediately.

  • http://dc.metblogs.com Kimberley

    If you go, rest assured that I will be JEALOUS. I tried to rally the troops last year when the schedule went up, no dice.

  • http://www.thirtyo.com/ mel

    I SOOOOOO want to go but I have no idea where I’ll even be living by that time. Not that that’s bad but it makes planning shit nearly impossible.

  • http://bethmauldin.com Beth

    If you can at all go to Austin for any part of SXSW – do it!! It’s a fantastic time! The interactive isn’t my favorite part of the festivals, but they do tend to have some really great panels and speakers. If you’re into movies, the film festival is fantastic!! There are tons of movie people at their movies, especially first screenings. And of course, the music part of SXSW is legendary.

    (I volunteered one year to work for SXSW and the next year just attended all the film festival stuff.)