If this was my job, I would be a bigger jerk

I like it here. I don't have to be nice or politically correct or censor what I say to keep from seeming like a nutcase.

That
being
said

I want to start flipping desks up in hurrrr. I stepped up again this year to plan a trip to the Boryeong Mud Festival because apparently I didn't learn my lesson last year. I made the event on Facebook, invited people from Yeosu and waited. I got notifications when people joined the event and I noticed immediately quite a few names I didn't recognize, but I thought "oh well, we usually have a few out of town friends join us." By the end of the first week the event was listed, the group was more than 1/2 people from a couple other local cities.

"No big deal," I thought, "we always have a few people from out of town."

Then the group got bigger, and more people from Yeosu joined.... and more people from the other cities joined. The name of the event is "Yeosu Mudfest 2013" so why are so many people from out of town joining?

I think it was one of those mini-feed things. Someone saw that their Yeosu friend joined an event, and then they joined and told their friends. It eventually got out of control, and I was getting messages from people asking for me to coordinate the bus so that they could get on in their city.... then it turned to getting their own bus. So many people joined that we would have needed a second hotel. So 2 hotels and 2 buses.

Then, I had gotten a message from someone in Yeosu asking if there was still room on the trip for them because they saw so many other people. At that point I realized that I had to ask the out-of-towners to do their own thing. They had enough people to form their own trip. It was ok when it was stragglers, but having to be responsible for 22 people from another city-- with no commission-- was too much for me to handle.

I asked them to leave the event and do their own thing, and I thought I did a pretty nice job of being as polite about it as possible. BEFORE I did that, I sent a message to someone asking who their out of town friends were, and saying that it was cool if those friends joined, but we couldn't accommodate all the other random people. I got a response saying that they had decided, in light of the out of towners being asked to leave, to go with the people from the other city (even though I offered them all a spot in our trip). Mind you, this was AFTER I booked the bus and hotel. So we had total trip cost worked out, and the price skyrocketed when the 5 people left. If they had told me TWO hours prior of their decision, it wouldn't have been an issue.

So then after that, someone asked if she and her friend could join, I said yes, figured them into the price..... and then, as I feared, they cancelled.

I don't think people realize the affect they're having when they cancel last minute. If you commit to doing something, you need to just do it and be responsible. Now I'm in the awkward position of asking my super awesome and helpful friend to do yet another thing and call the hotel to cancel a room. It will mean that we might have to squish into the rooms, but the cost will be a bit lower.

I'm afraid if I present the cost to people right now, more people will cancel because it will be too expensive.

So this is how I dealt with it: