Scrounging For Mangers: San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Booking Aftermath

The mad dash for discounted downtown hotel rooms for the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con is all over, bar the cancellations. Registration opened – and closed – last Thursday, and yesterday – April Fools’ Day, purely by coincidence – confirmation emails went to people lucky enough to snag them, leaving many disappointed. Not us, however… at least not completely.

Let’s start with the positives about the experience; unlike other years, the Web server for submitting reservations appeared to be more robust than a Vic-20. Thursday at the stroke of noon eastern time, I was able to get the Web page with the Magic Green Button to bring me to the registration page to load almost immediately, with only a couple of presses of the F5 (or: “Goddammit!”) key.

The registration form page opened immediately, and I was able to get my form submitted in its entirety by about 12:03. It was painless, at least compared to the last time I tried to obtain a room through the convention (2008), when it took me about two hours to get the page to load and by the time it did, the Hyatt, Sheraton and Hilton – Holy Grails of many convention goers – were a distant memory, like the dodo bird, or times when it was easy and hassle-free to attend SDCC.

The trouble, for me, started later Thursday evening, when I received my email confirming that my submission had been received. I had submitted a single hotel choice – the hotel in which we have stayed since we started attending SDCC in 2006, and not one of the primary downtown hotels. It is, in fact, a hotel that I have seen people who have drawn it in the Comic-Con lottery refer to as “exile,” only usually accompanied by obscenities.

Since that was really the only hotel we were interested in, and one that we have never been unable to book (Even in 2008, two hours after registration opened), I listed my backup options as, “Book a different room at the same hotel,” thinking in a worst case scenario we could be wait-listed. Again: our first choice hotel is referred to by most convention-goers as occupying, if not being, “The ass end of the universe.”

However, my confirmation email listed no hotel choices. And a backup option of booking the closest available hotel to the convention in lieu of my first choices. Which, again, were not listed. In effect, I had scrambled like a meth addict facing a TV whose insides hadn’t yet been disassembled and cataloged to wind up telling SDCC, “Big money, no whammy!”

So we’ll move on to the second appreciable positive of the experience: when I called Travel Planners, the travel agency working with SDCC for hotel bookings, they worked with me to rectify the situation, accepted my first choice in writing, and acknowledged updating my submission with my single hotel choice and backup option in writing. The process was simple relatively painless, and put me at ease about getting my room. After all, I had chosen a single hotel, somewhat off the beaten track and never anyone’s first choice, all date stamped within 180 seconds of the opening of hotel registration.

Yesterday evening, I got the email that, if Twitter’s #SDCC feed is any guide, half the civilized world was waiting for: I got my room! Well, a room. At a completely different hotel. One that is right in the thick of the action, about a block from the convention center, and almost 100 clams a night more expensive than my single original choice.

I understand that this is a hell of a thing to bitch about; I have seen plenty of disappointed Tweeters complaining that they got their registration request in a scant five or six minutes later than I did, and they got fuckall for a hotel room downtown. And there is a lot to be said for being so close to the convention center that I can probably spit on Joe Quesada’s head from my window, if not flick boogers at him in my hallway. And unlike many people attending the con, I can afford the rate; the only reason I tried to book a room through the convention this year is that I normally book one at my hotel of choice directly at their full rate. This is a practice, however, that was stymied this year by the Con’s insistence that the city make more rooms available at the con’s discounted rates, which had the side effect of making advance reservations at that hotel completely unavailable.

And then there’s the email itself. Which is filled with mangled HTML that make it look like it was sent by a spastic. And it’s fucked to the point that, for me (And again, if Twitter’s a guide, a lot of other people), the link I need to click to confirm my reservation? Yeah, it don’t work.

This broken link is a big deal, especially considering that if you don’t confirm your reservation and make a deposit at the link that whatever the busted link in the email is supposed to point to within 48 hours, you’re gonna lose it. You know, that reservation to a hotel you didn’t want at a price you didn’t expect. You’ll lose that. Some kind souls on Twitter have posted this link as the legit one, but we haven’t tested it, and didn’t bother; if you got the bad link, just call Travel Planners at 1-877-552-6642 and they’ll take your credit card info an lock in the res for you… but I had to stab in the dark and guess that calling would work.

After all this, even if you confirm your reservation and get some kind of email that everything is all set, after everything that’s happened (At least to me) during this process, are you really going to have any confidence that your reservation is really booked, legit, and will be ready for you when you arrive at the front desk after an exhausting day on non-refundable airplanes? My confirmation email says I won’t be able to get an actual confirmation from the hotel until two weeks before the convention; that’s a little late to be finding alternate lodging if I call the hotel on July 1 and hear, “Who? Yeah, no idea who you are, fuckface. I’ve got 200 rooms booked for a J. Quesada that I’m trying to work out on the other line, so call back later. When? Half past Fuck You o’clock sound good?”

On one hand, I applaud Comic-Con’s commitment to making more rooms at and affordable rate available for the convention to cut down on gouging. God knows the room I got would go for vastly more a night than I have it booked for if I called the front desk and hoped for the best… even if it’s still more than I wanted to pay.

However, the anecdotal evidence says that, since the con’s prebooking of rooms has made generally-available rooms vastly more difficult to book independently, you now have approximately 240 seconds to get a room anywhere close to downtown for the con. And that’s if you’re willing to accept any room, at any cost.

240 seconds. As a comparison? The launch window to go to Mars is two fucking months.