Being that I have never missed a PASS Summit yet (in the US), I thought I would share my experience about last PASS and previous PASS conferences.
I attended a Pre-Con with Kalen Delaney on Query Tuning and Plan Guides. I also remember sessions last PASS that were very relevant to my job. Each year that I attend PASS, I find that there is more to know and there is more to learn from many that are there to present.
I was pleased that when I got home each time, I applied my learning directly to my job. I remembered the Plan Guides day, and ironically while troubleshooting some performance issues with a database, found that I could leverage plan guides for a specific query, and it worked as Kalen illustrated. It actually saved many queries from bloating the plan cache, and was pretty helpful. But I had not done anything at that time with Plan Guides, so the topic and the time spent was very timely.
The other topics included Powershell and Wait Stats and Wait Types. The more practical sessions are very helpful and very applicable to my job as a DBA and manager mentoring DBAs. I can only say that I still plan attending all the SQL PASS Summits in the US. One day I hope to attend one outside of the US, but for now, the value of these Summits in networking, vendor introductions and all out knowledge transfer is worth every minute spent for me.