Fighting Until The Big Sleep: SDCC 2104 Hotel Reservations This Tuesday

sdcc_logoSan Diego Comic-Con has a weird system of guaranteeing admittance, if you think about it.

First it puts you through up to two different nervewracking and emotionally draining online sales just to obtain passes to be able to walk in the door. If you get those passes, then you need to obtain yourself transportation from wherever you’re at to San Diego, which really requires you to strike as soon as you know you have said passes. For example, if you’re heading to San Diego from Boston as we are, you have the choice of pre-booking one of exactly two non-stop flights ASAP while they’re not sold out, or you can try your luck at, say, Travelocity, to battle with strangers for a cut-rate seat with layovers in three different cities, one of which will be Baltimore, where, if you leave the airport, you will be killed. Which you will be okay with, because once you see that “pan pizza” in the gate area, you would rather risk violent death than eat it.

None of this sounds weird at face value. The weird part, however, is that you need to spend all that time and money just to get to Comic-Con, all without a place to, you know, sleep. Because the last thing that SDCC provides is hotel room sales, meaning that you could dump literally $1,500 to attend Comic-Con, all to arrive in San Diego and spend your first hours battling the local homeless for one of the park benches outside the train station.

We won’t be fighting for pine slats close to the Amtrak ticket booth, because we booked an emergency backup room about 10 days after we arrived home from last year’s SDCC. But we will be fighting with the rest of you on Tuesday, because that’s when the convention puts its reduced rate hotel rooms on sale.

Kinda. In the sense that you (and we) can battle for a certain spot on the waiting list for rooms to be sold once the sorting algorithm decides if you can have one or not.

So here’s what’s gonna happen: if you have a badge for this year’s SDCC, sometime between now and tomorrow, you will get an email from the convention with a link to the hotel sales Web site. On Tuesday at 9 a.m. Pacific time (noon here on the East Coast), that Web site will go live and allow you to request a room.

When you get in, you will need to select six hotels, in order of preference. And this is six, exactly, no more and no less. So you are going to want to peruse the list of available hotels and make and know your choices up front. And, if history is any guide, you then provide your name, address, and pertinent personal information, press submit… and then you wait. And – again, if history is a guide – you wait longer. For a few days, to see if you get the room that you wanted.

Which you well might not:

There are 130,000 attendees at Comic-Con and only so many hotel rooms downtown and in the greater San Diego area. Odds are you’re NOT going to get what you want right off the bat. Hotel reservations opening on Tuesday are for Attendees and Professionals. Exhibitors who set up the great booths in Comic-Con’s Exhibit Hall where everyone loves to shop have a separate room block.

Allow me to share our personal experience: we have participated in the convention hotel sales for only the past two years (previously we booked our favorite hotel directly, even though it cost more. That option went away in 2011, when the convention booked the whole hotel a year ahead of time). We got our first choice hotel only one of those times. And that time, I completed and submitted our hotel application before 12:03 p.m. Eastern Time. While every year is different, historically timing is a factor in this process.

Now, let’s remember that this process is only utterly necessary if you absolutely feel the need to stay downtown. There are many hotels off the beaten track that are part of the convention shuttle route (which are very, very decent – our first six SDCCs, we stayed more than a mile away from the serious downtown madness and we never felt like we were seriously out of the action, and we got a damn fine view of the bay to boot), and some of them are on sale now, with no fuss and no muss. SDCC is offering a presale for some of those outlier hotels that you can get confirmed for right now. You’ll need to pay the entire room fee up front (Downtown rooms booked through Tuesday’s sale require just a deposit once you are confirmed with a hotel, with the rest payable when you arrive), but if you’re booking a room now, it’s not like you’re not already carrying a pass barcode and planning to attend now, are you?

But if you absolutely need to be downtown, and don’t want to pay even close to the full room rate (all kidding aside: SDCC gets killer rates on these rooms), we will be battling you on Tuesday. Just make sure that you’re using a mobile phone or an old Android tablet over some coffee shop’s free wi-fi connection. You know, using anything but a real desktop computer on a wired, fast Internet connection.

Because that way, we will get a bitchin’ room instead of you.