Mecca will be awfully overcrowded
Didn’t get a room for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con? It’s probably too late now.
As their site says, “Comic-Con 2007 Starts NOW.” Given the problems with room registration, that’s sounding less like a pledge than a threat. Rooms went on sale this morning at 9 a.m. Pacific and went off sale almost instantaneously, through a mixture of breakdowns, timeouts, and soldouts. Well do I remember the days when one could saunter down to San Diego and pick up a room last-minute if one was of a mind to. Try that now and your room would be in Orange County or Tijuana.
Months ago I set a reminder in my iCal and on my Treo that rooms went on sale this morning and to for God’s sake book one! Our group who goes every year strategized in advance and Paul, who is a hotel professional, strongly suggested that he and I separately book suites in the hopes that we could get one (and, if we wound up with more than one reserved, cancel one of them).
At 8:55 I was ready. Had the browser open to try online reservations, had the phone at the ready to try phone reservations. For the next 48 minutes, the toll-free phone number was busy, and I lost every bit of cool I had trying to book a room online. The system kept crashing: timing out due to overload, or telling me that my session had timed out after 12 minutes with no activity (the activity, of course, being trying to get their overloaded servers to load the page). At one point I actually got far enough in the process to book an Embassy Suite for four nights, but when I clicked to confirm the site kicked me off again. By the time I got back on, it was gone. Just when I had visions of crashing somewhere in Petco Park, Paul called on my cellphone to say he’d managed to book a suite. Phew!
Here’s what I emailed him (cc’ing the rest of the group):
Bless you, my son. You have clearly saved our souls yet again. (Without Paul, there would be no room.)
Phew!
I cannot even begin to describe the ordeal this morning was trying to get a room…!
Please note that Paul and I agreed to book the Wednesday night “preview night” as well, given that last year it took about two hours (!) to get through the mob into the convention center on the first day!
I think if terrorists really wanted to take down our society, they’d hit the Con. Please don’t forward this to terrorists!
Lee
As you see from that, it no longer matters how early one leaves to get to the Con on Thursday morning — once you’re there, you still cannot get in. We were preregistered and the line we had to wait in was still so long that I was sure at the end of it someone was handing out sacks of cash. This year we’ll be staying over the night before (which gains us admission to the Preview Night, and, most probably, a drinking and poker night in our room).
So: Thinking of just “dropping in” on the San Diego Comic Con this year? Take some friendly advice: don’t.
February 6th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
In 2006, on the Saturday of thee Con, the pre-registration line was longer than I have ever seen it before. The line went the lenght of the convention center then some.
The booking process this year was horrible. Like Lee, my iBook was ready at 11:50am (rooms started at noon eastern time) I opened Firefox and went to the bookmarked Con page and then things came to a crashing halt. Three times Firefox timed out. I then switched to Saffari and was able to get to the Con page. Once on the Con page it took minutes to load each page of the booking process. When I got to the page for the credit card info I was stuck for ten minutes waiting for the secure server to accept my information. All the while I was worried that the Shearton Suites would fill up while I waited.
Twenty minutes after I started booking the reservation it was done. The entire time I was very aprehensive that we would not get a room. I was thinking of other rooming options, such as bed and breakfasts, hotels outside of downtown, sleeping on the streets, etc.
The way the hotel availability went so quickly this year does not bode well for the number of people attendding the Con in July.
One thing I am happy about, is that planning for the Con takes my mind off the 19 degree tempature with wind chills around 8.
Paul
March 18th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
[…] 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. […]
February 6th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
[…] the trying circumstances behind attempting to book a room last year for the San Diego Comic Con. I wrote about that here. And this year, our group who go every year expected it, rightly, to be even worse. (Which at the […]