Why are the registration fees for academic conferences so high? I was actually thinking about submitting one of my papers in a conference which is to be held in Spain (LATA 2014) but alas I might not be able to do so since the registration fees for this conference is 400 Euros (discounted since I'm a student) which is virtually impossible to afford (since in addition to the registration fees I will have to travel to Spain as well). In fact just to get a sense of how much money this is, this 400 Euros is almost equivalent to half the salary (in terms of basic pay) a senior professor earns in my country (India) and I see that this conference is not the only one when it comes to such high fees. What are the real reasons behind such high fees? Isn't this in some away discouraging genuine contributions in academia?
Typically the fees are to cover the facilities of the meeting including services attached to the venue. In addition there may be administrative costs for the conveners to be added to that. My experience says that everytime you let a professional conference center and staff organize a meeting it becomes very expensive. this may seem like a bad ideabut what is often not seen is the work volounteers would have to put in if you tried to organize a large conference without such help. Free help is usually not easy to muster these days.

So while I agree that conference fees may seem ridiculously high at times the reason is that it would be hard to organize them otherwise. It may be easier for recurring conferences since they can build a knowledge base and tools to help but for a one-off the ask can be too large without professional help.

By keeping a discussion open about these costs we can perhaps put the spotlight on the problems and realize that we cannot both have the cake and eat it. In order to reduce costs meetings may have to be organized in simpler venues and by more volounteers from the community.