Tag: SDCC Hotels

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Comic-Con International finally announced the opening of this year’s convention block in San Diego hotels: March 19.

This time last year, they’d already gone on sale and sold out.

As recently as three (or maybe four) years ago, they’d have sent a postcard by January. They used to include a full list of hotels in the winter newsletter with distance and prices. I could swear I remember them going on sale in January.

Of course, five years ago you could still book the Little Italy Super 8 only less than a month in advance. Now the discounted rooms are in such demand that they sell out in a matter of hours.

Like last year, they are only selling tickets in advance, so if you plan on attending, you should order them online.

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Possibly jumping the gun, but last night I reserved a backup hotel for next year’s Comic-Con. Although considering that most of the big-name hotels right by the convention center are already booked (though I’m sure they’ve set aside blocks for the convention already) or want incredible amounts of money per night, perhaps it’s not that crazy an idea.

The price and distance are just good enough that I’d be willing to skip the insane reservation crunch when the convention block goes on sale next year, though I’ll probably give it a shot to see if I can get something closer.

Meanwhile, we’re seriously considering hitting WonderCon again next year, which will also give us another excuse to visit people up in the Bay Area. (Not that we should need an excuse, but it seems like we do.)

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Tomorrow morning at 9:00 PST, rooms in the convention block go on sale for this year’s Comic-Con International. I was going to write up a bunch of tips last week, but CCI beat me to it by launching their own blog, Staying In San Diego. Visit it today, because it’ll probably be swamped tomorrow. (Though if it’s actually hosted by TypePad, direct visits may not take it down.)

Update Wednesday Morning: Well, I made it through. Oddly enough, in exactly the same amount of time as last year. I had the confirmation number at 10:04. Weird.

Once again, I was completely unable to get through by phone. The website was hit and miss, and actually crashed at one point, serving up only a “500 Server Busy” error. Right after I entered my name and address for a reservation. Nice. The current blog entry is filling up with complaints from people having similar or worse experiences.

Update 2: The Beat has a growing comment thread as well, and notes that the con hotel blog is making noises about trying to get Travel Planners to fix the problems. I think having an official place where they can read exactly what people are going through is helping convey the fact that the reservation system is broken, and that it’s not just the imbalanced supply and demand for rooms. (end of update 2)

I’m going to repeat some of my criticisms about the actual website, which seems designed expressly to make it bog down under this load: Continue reading →

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Spent a good chunk of last night looking at travel websites. Accomplished 2 things:

  • Arranged for a hotel to stay in San Francisco next month.
  • Arranged for a back-up hotel for San Diego Comic Con, just in case we can’t get a room through the convention desk.

Hotel rooms during Comic-Con have become a scarce commodity over the last few years, as attendance has shot up by thousands (it actually sold out before the doors opened last year!) but only a few hundred new hotel rooms have been added to Downtown San Diego. Rooms in the convention blocks have been selling out in a matter of hours. The con website has crumbled under the stress, and the phone lines have caved. Last year it took me over an hour just to get through. This year, they haven’t even published a list of which hotels are involved, and it looks like they’ve dropped fax from their options. And booking downtown hotels directly isn’t an option: either they’re sold out, or they want $350/night-plus.

So, just in case I can’t get a room downtown when they go on sale next week, we can at least stay someplace near a trolley station. And if I can get a closer room, even if they charge me $25 to cancel the first reservation, it’s worth the peace of mind.

(Originally posted at LiveJournal. Brought over here to fit with the rest of my convention posts, and as a snapshot of the days when you could get a backup hotel. Not downtown, but in…it might’ve been Old Town? In any case, I cancelled the room once we got our confirmation from the convention block hotel sale.)

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It took an hour and four minutes, but I managed to book a hotel for Comic-Con International this morning. (Yes, it’s not until July. And I still want to call it San Diego Comic Con.) Last year I was unable to get through online or by phone, but had no problems faxing the reservation request.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** Continue reading →

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It’s been almost two weeks since hotel reservations for the San Diego Comic Con went on sale and sold out in a matter of hours.

The crunch is amazing. Last year, San Diego’s public transportation system dissolved under the combined assault of 100,000+ Comic Con attendees and a weekend of Padres games. Two years ago, the first year we stayed in town instead of just driving down for Saturday, we booked so late that we were stuck with the Super 8. Just for kicks, I checked the prices there. A room for this coming weekend would cost half what we paid per night on Comic Con weekend in 2004. And their prices during the con this year? I can’t tell, because they’re already sold out.

This morning, Travel Planners (the company handling reservations for the convention) sent out an email to people who had reserved hotel rooms through their service. After assuring me that my reservation was fine, they went on to ask:

In the meantime, we have a favor to ask of you. Please take a minute to reassess the number of rooms that you’ve booked and help your fellow attendees and exhibitors by canceling any rooms that you are not absolutely certain you’ll need.

Like you, we’re all thrilled that Comic Con is growing by leaps and bounds every year, but with each new show it gets more and more difficult to find enough hotel rooms to accommodate so many visitors. Accordingly, every hotel room becomes an integral part of the show’s success.

It’s not uncommon for people to grab multiple rooms just in case more people come, or to keep their options open (say, reserving both an expensive hotel downtown and a less expensive one further out, then cancelling one once they’ve made a decision). I’m astonished that it’s come to the agency pleading with people to let others have a chance at the rooms now, instead of waiting until just before the hotels start charging for cancellations.

On a related note, now’s as good a time to any to link to some recommendations for anyone planning to attend Comic Con:

  • Our own Suggestions for Comic-Con still hold up. I’d like to add: don’t forget to pack long pants as well as shorts. It may be July, but San Diego is a coastal city, and it can get cold at night or in the morning. Update: We’ve expanded this to a more thorough Tips for Comic Con at Speed Force.
  • The Comics Reporter’s Comic Con By the Numbers has been updated.
  • And of course, there’s Aubrey’s Guide to Con Hygiene.

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There! Everything’s set for Comic Con. I had been really annoyed with myself last month when I pulled out the pre-reg forms only to discover I had missed the deadline by two days, meaning we’d have to… <reverb>STAND IN LIIIINE!!!!</reverb> *cue scream*

We had to stand in line for on-site registration a few years ago, and let me tell you, it was a near-disaster. We got there before the doors opened. By the time we got through the line, it was time for lunch.

The thing is, we’d been thinking about getting a hotel room in San Diego and going for several days, which would mean we could go through the registration line on a smaller day, with (we hoped) a smaller line. Combined with the fact that we haven’t really taken a honeymoon trip, we came up with this grand plan to take the whole week off, go to San Diego, do the touristy thing for several days and wander in and out of Comic Con at the end of the week. Various things conspired to cut this down, and we ended up planning half a week.

And of course the hotels are all booked.

I went back again tonight, to see what might have opened up and to look farther out. There are places charging $150/night for Wednesday and then $750/night for Thursday through Saturday. There are places charging $200 during the week and $1000 on weekends. The price difference is just insane! I almost wanted to sign up with one of the nice hotels for the first night or two and then head over to someplace else when their rates changed. [Edit: It occurs to me that this price difference probably isn’t an insane markup for weekends/a big convention weekend. More likely it’s the difference between a standard room and a deluxe suite, and while standard rooms are available for Wednesday, they’ve all been snapped up for the weekend, leaving only deluxe rooms open.]

The really cool thing, though, is that when I checked back at the Comic Con website for hotel info, I discovered they had added ONLINE REGISTRATION. *cue choir*

So we’re pre-registered after all (even if the form does arbitrarily choose who the primary contact is when you list more than one person. I filled out myself, then Katie and it tried to use her for the credit card info and email contact. So I started over, filled in her first, then me, and it used me for billing and listed my address for email contact… but it sent her the confirmation email.)

The hotel we ended up with — after a number of false starts that ended in “sorry, no rooms available” — isn’t fantastic, but it at least looks like it isn’t a total fleabag, and it’s reasonably close to the convention center. [Edit: It was the Super 8 in Little Italy.] We could probably walk if we had to, and it looks like we ought to be able to take the trolley, except for the fact that the %^$# trolley map is so abstracted I can’t actually tell whether there’s a stop nearby. (I figure driving on Saturday, at least, won’t save us any time.)

Vacation time? Check.
Registration? Check.
Hotel Reservations? Check.

Whew!

(Originally posted at LiveJournal, and brought over here because the rest of my con posts are here, and it’s an interesting look back at a time when you could get tickets and a hotel for Comic-Con a week and a half before the event!)

Current Mood: accomplished