Dear devotees,
Hare Krishna. Please accept our humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
As you might have heard, we have about 2700 devotees registered for the event. For an event of this magnitude, we need to plan various aspects of the event to provide the best experience for all the registered devotees. Also, all of your safety is of utmost importance to us. As this is the first time we are doing the event in a city and in a hotel, we are implementing additional measures to ensure that we are able to serve the existing registered devotees nicely as planned.
Wrist bands
As we do every year, every registered person will get a wrist band when they check-in on Friday. Detailed instructions for the event check-in will be sent later. The wrist bands are required for access to Prasadam and kirtans. This year the wristband will include a NFC tag which is associated with a specific individual and hence not interchangeable. We will be scanning the wrist bands on the Prasadam lines and in Kirtan hall as well. You will not be able to get a wrist band if you have not registered with us. We won’t be allowing any exceptions at check-in, even if you have paid someone and bought their registration. Every exception that we handle at check-in takes time away from serving the devotees who have registered four months ago.
Security
Marriott hotel requires us to take responsibility for ensuring only authorized persons are on their property. Hence we will be checking the ID at the check-in desk before giving the wrist bands to comply with their requirement. We have hired officers from the local Police Department to supervise our event on all 4 days. This will be an additional security apart from what Marriott provides. The officers will make sure everyone in the property has our wrist bands. If they don’t, they will be escorted to the check-in desk first and eventually to the door if they are not registered.
NO WALK-INS
We have hit all our capacity for this event including day passes. We won’t be selling even day passes at the event for walk-ins. Please let anyone you know who is planning to walk-in to not drive all the way to the event and ask for purchasing day passes. Unfortunately, we will have to send them back.
Early Arrivals
The registration cost covers Prasadam from Friday dinner. Some of the devotees are arriving one or two days earlier as the flight tickets were cheaper on those days. We are able to cook simple Prasadam only for the volunteers for these days before the event. We have requested quite a few volunteers to arrive early to help with the setup of the event. Hence we are requesting others to take care of their Prasadam, as we want to keep this cooking simple and focus more on getting the setup done for the main event. For those of you who arrive on Friday morning, we are making simple lunch Prasadam for about 300 people. It’s on a first come, first served basis.
Registration without accommodation
Some of the devotees have registered without the accommodation option or purchased day passes. The assumption is that these devotees have arranged their own accommodation. We request you to not share the rooms of your friends who have booked a hotel room with us. The hotels are giving us a discounted rate provided we comply with their policies such as room occupancy limit etc. They will be able to check-in only the people who are on the list we have sent to them.
Shuttles
As announced earlier, we will be running shuttles to the 4 hotels in Allen from Marriott and back. More details including the frequency will be sent in another email later. These shuttles are only for devotees who have booked accommodation with us. We kindly request others to have their own transportation arrangements.
We kindly request everyone to follow these policies and spread this message in your communities. We understand that some of these policies might appear to be strict, but please know that our intention and goal is to serve all the devotees nicely. We have a huge team behind us, we are all trying our best to serve all the Vaisnavas coming for this event 🙏
