Faster than a speeding bullet
That’s how quickly the rooms for Comic-Con sell out every year.
When last we reported on hotel reservations for the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, trusty friend Paul had secured us a suite. Since then, he’s been dutifully trying to get us a suite at the Embassy Suites because, well, we want to be even closer to the all-hours spectacle of funnybook debauchery and bad costumes (imagine jumbo-sized people stuffed into Ant-Girl-sized tights; lots of lycra, lots of yellow taffeta and powder-blue eyeliner and glitter). Here, from Sequential Tart, is why Alberto Gonzales has a better chance of remaining Attorney General than we do of getting a different room:
According to Comic Con International’s website 114,000 attendees, plus 9000 exhibitor staff (making a total of 123,000 people) attended 2006’s Comic Con International: San Diego.
In her February 2006 article, Why you didn’t get a hotel room in San Diego, Heidi MacDonald observed that while over 100,000 people attended 2005’s Comic-Con International: San Diego, less than 7,000 hotel rooms were available through the convention’s hotel website. (As an aside, MacDonald dug up not one, but two articles on how the San Diego Convention Center has outstripped the supply of hotel rooms.)
The situation for 2007 has not improved much. While the San Diego Convention Center Corporation (SDCCC) web site proudly boasts that there are over 10,000 hotel rooms within one mile of the convention center, page 10 of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau’s 2007 San Diego Tourism Outlook reveals that only 269 hotel rooms were added in 2006, and that, “[s]ome projects expected to open in 2006 are now anticipated in 2007, when an estimated 2,300 rooms will be added, a 4.2% increase to the County’s total inventory.”
Just how many rooms are available in San Diego County? According to page 11 of the same report, the 2006 total is 51,882 (54,037 if counting Bed and Breakfasts, Spa Resorts, and Casino Resorts). Downtown, with its roughly 10,000 rooms, accounts for 27% of the county’s total.
A traditional economist — one versed in supply and demand — would say that either more rooms will become available (more hotels being built; some people quitting the Con is disgust with trying to get a room) while in the short-term at least the prices of rooms will rise. If all this is true, given the shortage of rooms — at any rate — I think my friend Alan in San Diego could rent out his sleeper sofa for $295 a night.
March 19th, 2007 at 10:16 am
For the Comic Con some hotels were not even available through the Con site. For example the U.S. Grant Hotel is not a luxury property. The lowest rate available was $469 per night. Not many Con attendees will be staying at this property. I am sure some of the large exhibitors will book rooms there, but the average person, not at that rate.
I was cleaning out some old e-mails last week and ran across one from February 2006 that Lee had sent about the room for that summer. In the e-mail Lee wrote that we were lucky to get anything. Based on the increase in attendance last year we are extremely lucky to have been able to reserve any hotel room with in 20 miles of downtown.
Paul
March 19th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
I checked the Con web site and found that three hotels had been added to the official list. They are north of downtown San Diego in Mission Valley, about 20 miles away.
Paul