Improving decision making: using web research to budget for a sales

The Foremost Composite Materials Company is planning a two-day sales conference for October 19-20.  The conference consists of all-day meetings that the entire sales force, numbering 120 sales representatives must attend. Each sales representative requires his or her own room. Management has set a budget of $150,000, and is expecting this to cover the sales representatives rooms, airline tickets and food costs. The company would like to hold the conference in Miami, Florida, at a Hilton or Marriott-owned hotel.

Use the Hilton and Marriott Web sites to select a hotel in whichever of these cities that would enable the company to hold its sales conference within its budget (do not include the sales conference meeting room in the cost, just the hotel rooms. Also food costs are just for Oct 19 & Oct 20). Then locate flights arriving the day prior to the conference (Oct 18). Your attendees will be coming from Los  Angeles(50 sales reps), San Francisco (20 sales reps), Seattle (20 sales reps), Chicago (10 sales reps), and Pittsburgh (20 sales reps). Determine costs of each airline ticket from these cities. When you are finished, create a budget for the conference. The budget will include the cost of each airline ticket, the room cost, and $70 per attendee per day for the food. Remember to create budget for both the Hilton and Marriott. The budget will determine the best price determined by the hotel rates.