IRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is a nonprofit organization that provides PreK-12 students with team-based robotics competitions worldwide. FIRST ends each robotics season with the FIRST Championship, the highest level of competition a team can achieve. The FIRST Championship has been held in Houston, Texas for the past several years and hosts hundreds of teams from multiple programs and age levels, who travel from all over the world. However, this June, FIRST released a blog post titled: “FIRST Championship Updates: 2025 & Beyond.” In that blog post, they announced: “As part of updated participation requirements, all teams traveling to FIRST Championship will be required to book their lodging accommodations within those designated hotel blocks.” Previously, teams could elect to book their housing through FIRST rather than being required to. This new policy is detrimental to FIRST teams.
The policy on the surface may seem to help teams. FIRST cites a number of reasons for the change, such as helping to negotiate block rates and ensuring the housing available for participants is safe and accessible. However, in practice, requiring teams to have their housing booked by FIRST only hurts teams.
The first issue with this change is that there is clear potential for FIRST to financially benefit from this requirement. If you look at FIRST’s 990 from the 2021-2022 fiscal year, on page 9 under the statement of revenues, you can see that there is a line item titled “Hotel Commissions” with the amount of $400,000 in revenue. This suggests that FIRST receives a cut when teams book hotels through their system. One should also consider what FIRST stands to gain by changing this policy. If anything, requiring all housing for the FIRST Championship to be booked through them adds more work for them and there does not appear to be a clear benefit for the organization other than the potential kickback they get.
The second major issue is that the FIRST Community at large hates this change. On Chief Delphi, a forum that FIRST teams use to communicate, users have reacted very negatively to the new policy. People have described the change as “tone-deaf”, “INSANE” and a “disgusting move,” among other things. Many who have used FIRST’s booking system in the past have faced issues, and a lot of people find it to be easier and cheaper to book housing on their own. In general, having more options and flexibility when booking travel is something that people will find to be more convenient and cost-effective than having to go through a middleman.
Clearly, requiring teams to book housing through FIRST is a decision that hurts teams, limits their options for travel to and from the FIRST Championship and has potential financial benefits for FIRST as an organization. As someone who has been a part of FIRST as a student, mentor and volunteer, it feels like this is part of a very real trend where FIRST continuously disregards the burden that it places on its teams. A FIRST Robotics Competition Team (one of the high school programs run by FIRST) has to pay $6,000 just to register for the season, another $4,000 if they make it to the District Championship, and another $5,750 to attend the FIRST Championship. That’s over $15,000 just for event and registration fees, and doesn’t cover the other costs teams face, such as equipment, robot parts, travel, etc. While the other programs FIRST runs are much less expensive, FIRST should still seriously reconsider the financial burden it is putting on individual teams and how that can stunt the growth and sustainability of FIRST programs across the world.