Well, their badges are designed, and not typically taken as pure user submission (check out http://bit.ly/dm80Im for their design process) .... I mentioned the cost, not in that there would be a big cost to them per say, but more directing resources towards 20 users, rather than the entire user base, isn't something they can "afford" to do with their business currently. I think you are correct that doing it once isn't necessarily a huge amount of time, though, it may not be a negligible amount of time either, but if all 300+ foursquare meetup organizers all tried to get a page, for their "group" then they might be opening themselves up to a lot more work then they are capable of doing .... If the initiative would generate A LOT of buzz, or was going to be directly funded (they were paid, out of an advertising budget, for example), I think they could justify it ... Even trying to setup a special / discount can be a long / slow process, currently. I know of at least one business in town, that has very few foursquare checkin's, but still wants to participate - they have been waiting weeks, and still have no feedback on when their request to create a discount will be processed/activated. I am also curious where the line is drawn, on their side. How many users make this sort of thing worth their while? How much exposure would it need to generate for them to want to participate? For myself, I only asked for a page, I was willing to do all the design, setup some tips .... work on creating timely/appropriate reminders/updates, etc .... Then, at some time in the future, I would have asked to talk about badges, because that is another fun part of the game.... but my response was that they are currently working on their scaling issues, and infrastructure projects .... so it will be fun and exciting to see when they open it up a bit more, and just how they process requests at that time .... and who knows, maybe I am mistaken, maybe all it would take is tourism PG officially asking, and not just someone, who said they will talk with tourism PG, later???