Day 4 of FedCon concluded on Sunday and with it the end of the 20th Fedcon in Dusseldorf, Germany.
As the fourth day of a convention that usually runs for only three days, the last day of the convention was a little bit slow and there were visible signs of people and vendors packing everything up, ready to clear out after 5pm when the closing ceremony was completed.
Panels on the day included Nicole De Boer as well as joint panels from Wil Weaton & Marina Sirtis and Garrett Wang & Robert Duncan McNeill. Both panels were fantastic however things did start to get a little bit repetitive with alot of the same questions being asked the the same gags being played. The day was a lot shorter as well, kicking of at around 10am and finishing at 5pm.
FedCon XX has been a fantastic experience in terms of meeting the fans, meeting the vendors and making friends. To my new friends: Eileen, Maja, Holger, Guther, Filip and Felix all from Germany, Margarita (a person, not the drink) from Kazakhstan, Erland from Norway and Tabitha and Steven from Switzerland, I just want to say that it was fantastic meeting you all and that I hope we can all stay in touch.
To the numerous girls of Fedcon that I’ve photographed and taken photos with over the past few days, I hope you’ll drop me an email to zach@startrekradio.com so that we can get to know one another a bit better.
And to those wonderful couples I met who were lucky enough to meet each other and find love at previous FedCon’s, I’d also love to get to know you all more as I think your FedCon love stories are really fantastic.
However, with all of that said, FedCon XX was not without its problems on the management end; Trek Radio met at least 15 people who had flown to FedCon from countries such as Scotland, Norway, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden and so forth on the basis that FedCon is promoted as an international convention. All of those people speak English as a second language and speak no German. Almost all attending Germans also speak English as a second language too. And all of the attending celebrity guests did their panels in English, so for large parts of the convention to be solely in German, really upset alot of people.
The opening ceremony, closing ceremony, talent show and several secondary panels were all almost completely in German and this alienated alot of people. These are people who spent over £1000 each to come to the FedCon who felt that they had missed out on large parts of the convention due to them being in German.
In addition, despite Trek Radio having had prior contact with all attending Star Trek celebrity guests and confirming interviews with them, the management at FedCon were left to schedule these interviews so that they did not conflict with autograph sessions, panels and other commitments. Over the course of the 5 days we were at Fedcon, we were granted two interviews out of second that we were supposed to do and in one case, we met the management at 10am on a day to confirm an interview at 1pm on the same day. We arrived at 1pm and were told it had been rescheduled to 11.30am – the management had 5 ways of contacting us (walkie-talkie radio, cell phone, SMS, the tannoy system and a second cell phone) and this was the first we heard of it – absolutely attrosious.
Finally, Trek Radio has to object to the way that the management treated press – we saw multiple cases of press arguing with the management presumably over some of the same issues we had which included being guarenteed NO seating whatsoever in the panels (generally speaking, press would normally be giving first or second row seats); all members of the press were left to free-for-all and PVP for any seats that might be available which often meant we ended up in the back row. In addition, different members of management seemed to have conflicting information and several members of management and security were downright rude.
Do not get the wrong impression, the celebrity guests at FedCon were great and the 5000+ attending guests were fantastic – I met so many people and made so many friends. However I feel it’s just a great shame that the press were treated so badly in some cases.
All of that said, I would still recommend the FedCon to any of you that might be considering going next year. Trek Radio will be working with a local hotel in Dusseldorf to arrange a hotel room discount and shuttle service to and from the convention for Trek Radio listeners that attend, so despite having a bitter taste in our mouth about our treatment and the treatment of some of the guests who invested huge amounts of money to get to the FedCon, we will be back there next year if only to meet the great friends we made this year.
I also want to give a special shoutout to the folks at GameForge – you guys absolutely rock and treated us like kings for the entire duration of the convention. I hope that we have a long and succesful working relationship together and for those of you who are waiting with baited breath for Infinite Space, I can safetly say that its a fantastic and awesome game, you will not be dissappointed.
Please keep an eye on the Trek Radio website over the next few days as we have tonnes of additional post-con articles coming up as well as mini-interviews, video footage, more photos, audio clips from all panels and much much more.
Stay tuned!
