This upcoming weekend marks the 2007 University of Southern California and Notre Dame football game at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, IN. This is a huge rivalry for both teams – one that began in 1926 over a conversation between the wives of the respective managers of the two teams. As the story goes, the conversation began with the women wishing to take a vacation to get out of the cold Indiana winters every other year. This concept began way back in 1926 and has stuck for the last 71 years! The 2007 game will take place on Saturday, October 20th and 3:30 EST. I, being a 2003 USC alumni, am traveling to Chicago with a group of other USC alumni Friday evening to then take a bus to South Bend on Saturday. What has baffled me the past two times I have experienced this weekend has been the pricing of both flights, and more importantly, accommodations for the weekend. I am wondering if the airlines and hotels anticipate this arrival of a few thousand people from across the country and therefore hike up the prices. I began my search for flights in early June and began to search for hotels shortly thereafter. The hotels were outrageously over priced, even four months in advance!! I would really like to know if proprietors of hotels immediately make the prices $100-200 higher than normal when they anticipate larger crowds for a specific event? Does the same go for airlines? I actually got a fairly reasonable flight from LAX to Chicago-Midway (MDW), but this was four months before the event. I checked the same flights a month ago and they were absolutely outrageous! I do realize this kind of thing happens for the Super Bowl, World Series and Olympics. I guess I just didn’t know that the college football market was a big enough event to gouge the public of reasonable accommodations and transportation. –Kate Simpson, West Coast regional manager