Until a few years ago we paid only $100 to hire a room at a local club for meetings. A few people bought drinks for themselves. Recently the club bumped up the price to several hundred dollars and also made purchase of minimum amount of food and drink a condition of room hire. We would have been hard-pressed to spend less than $500.
Last year we approached a local bar which was normally closed on a particular week night. The opened for free and we (the committee) agreed to spend about $250 on their rather nice selection of bar snacks that the OC would otherwise have paid for room hire. People bought their own drinks. The snacks were passed around and popular. We had hoped that we would spend no more than we would have needed to spend at the club but create a more pleasant atmosphere.
I would say it was a partial success but I think the bar owner will be less keen to repeat it. I do not think we spent enough to make it worthwhile for him to open up.
It might be that your committee has experienced the same trend and they were actually about as economical as they could be. Perhaps you could ask? If they relate an experience like mine, perhaps suggest that they could make it more explicit in the meeting notice that they are hoping to create a more welcoming environment to encourage more owners to attend the AGM and that the room is about as cheap as they could manage to hire.
BTW. When you say ‘all general meetings are held in this room’, do you mean just the Annual General Meeting or do you have more frequent general meetings or do you actually mean the committee meetings? Being a bit posher in a bigger room for the AGM could be reasonable. Committee meetings could be in committee members units. When I have been on our committee, we have always met in committee members’ units, whoever was willing to host but generally not those committee members with a partner trying to get children to bed at the same time. For committee meetings, quite often somebody would bring some wine and/or snacks to share. This was not charged to the owners corporation.