Getting Housed: San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Lottery Finished

Registration for hotels with the reduced rate negotiated by San Diego Comic-Con for the 2014 convention opened at noon Eastern Time today. It is now closed, after being inundated with requests from God knows how many thousands of people looking to sleep someplace more comfortable than a park bench across from the Hall of Justice, emblazoned with an advertisement for a bail bonds service you will soon desperately need.

And just like that, the long and arduous process to arrange a trip to SDCC 2014, which started in February with pre-registration, continued for some into standard registration in March, moved into procuring transportation to San Diego, and climaxed with today’s registration, is over.

Kinda. Because now the 36 to 48 hour wait to see if today’s hotel registration actually led to, you know, getting a hotel room.

So here’s how things played out, at least from my standpoint as a dude trying to score a room the same as everyone else: at just about straight up noon on my NIST-synced desktop, I hit F5 on my browser that was pointed to the registration URL and the page… loaded. No muss, no fuss, no lag, no delays, it just loaded.

With no issues, I entered my six hotel choices, my name and address, my email address and the dates I need for a room and pressed submit. And that’s it; everything went smoothly… at least from the hardware and networking side of things.

In my head, I was frantic. Because this is a similar system to what has been used for at least the past two years (prior to that, I booked hotel rooms directly through my target hotel; before 2012, the last time I had booked through the convention was in 2008), and that system rewards speed. All room requests are processed on a first come, first served basis, and it treats a lack of attention the same way the jungle does: hesitation equals death.

In 2012, I completed my registration in about three minutes, and I didn’t get my first-choice hotel. Last year, I completed it in about two and a half minutes and did get my first choice hotel… but I saw complaints on Twitter that people who completed their forms within less than ten minutes not only didn’t get their first choice hotel, they didn’t get dick. This year I beat my own record, and had my registration submitted in about one minute and 45 seconds. And how did I rate?

Beats the living shit out of me; we won’t find out what, if any, hotel we got until sometime before the end of April 10th.

And not only that, but you don’t find out if your registration form even went through right away. The confirmation email from Travel Planners, the convention’s travel agency that handles the registration, doesn’t come as soon as you submit your form. And after you’ve frantically filled in fields, trying to get your form in before some opportunistic douchebag, or perhaps Seth Green, gets your chosen room and leaves you in the hostel across from Nicky Rotten’s trying to kill bedbugs with an abandoned Bic lighter last used to cook heroin, you very quickly become anxious that you filled in some of the fields wrong.

That anxiety has passed for us; we received our confirmation that our registration had gone through before 5 p.m. That anxiety, however, led me to book yet another backup hotel room at least in the greater downtown area, just to make sure we’re taken care of when we arrive in San Diego in July. Is that paranoia? Sure, but it means that the next two days will be filled with a moderate anticipation as to whether we will be staying in our favorite hotel, or merely a very good hotel at a cost that will mean we need to pass on a piece of art of a convention exclusive or two. You know, as opposed to spending two days wondering whether it is possible to spend a week sleeping in a rented Geo Metro.

But if things don’t work out for you, don’t despair. Hotel reservations will reopen on April 23rd at noon Eastern Time, where there will be a possibility that some people who scored today decided not to follow through with their reservations. Further, the Early Bird sale on hotels outside of downtown (but often still on the shuttle route) is still going on now. And clearly, since I was able to get a direct reservation today, there are still hotels out there willing to take your money (granted, at more expensive prices than you’ll get through Travel Planners, who provides great rates), or even just confirm a registration that you can cancel close to the convention in case you can score from the con later.

But otherwise, now we wait. One last mile, kids…