Tag: Hoteloween

As I write this, the hotel situation for this year's San Diego Comic-Con remains in flux. Open hotel registration—which is in effect a lottery based on hand and browser speed—took place yesterday morning, and it was a tense, tense 10 minutes with confirmation emails yet to go out. Hours of training, both physical and mental, memorizing maps and testing internet speed were all for nought for a bunch of folks—the Beat included—because the website suffered some kind of hitch. Tony Kim has a sad account, backed up by many on Twitter. As the world collectively hit the refresh button at high noon EDT, 9 am PDT, the hotel selection form froze up and then sent you to the "Congrats, wait for your email" screen. That's what happened here. I got the first screen, clicked on some hotels hit return, got kicked out and then sat there in confusion and dread and then went back in. The second time it worked but by then four minutes had passed, four precious, precious minutes, and downtown hotels are usually gone long before that to people with better autofill speeds.

Arrrgh, the most tension filled day of the year for Stately Beat Manor is tomorrow. San Diego Comic-Con hotel registration opens up at noon EDT, 9 am PDT. Gentlemen, start your browsers....and do not...

Remember back in the day two years ago when you could go on the Ace Parking site and buy advance parking for the San Diego Comic-Con? Well, this is no more. A new random lottery based system has been put in place, to go with all the other random lottery systems for Comic-Con:

It's the scariest day of the year! Well, scariest if you already have a badge that is. Hotel registration for the San Diego Comic-Con took place at 9 am pdt, and it didn't take...

As the lamentwitterations filter over the land, the results of this year's Hoteloween are being discovered. And while the lucky ones who got their first hotel choice smile to themselves, the tweets of the homeless fill the air.

That's right, even if you weren't on the internet at 12:00:00 pm pst ON THE DOT, there are still excellent hotels available right now. Many are on the shuttle root, many are name brand resorts.

Okay, hotel room reservation notification for this year's San Diego Comic-Con started rolling out last night...and it was a mixed bag. Although The Beat got a room at our second choice, lots of people didn't get a room at all. And based on an informal Twitter survey, it all seems to have been pretty random. People who got in between 9:03 and 9:09 seemed to run the gamut from first choice to no choice. Was this really just a lottery? SOMEWHERE, we SEEM to remember reading that time stamps within 3 minutes of each other would be treated as a tie and processed in random order....but now we can't find that language anywhere on the CCI site, so maybe we just imagined it? At any rate this kind of process would explain what happened.

In a few hours, reservations for hotel rooms for this year's San Diego Comic-Con are going to be available, kicking off the annual rite known as Hotel-o-ween. YOU never know what you're going to get—it might be a trick, or it might be a treat.