SDCC '10 and the Hyatt Hotel mess continues

Pretty damn funny to learn today via the San Diego Comic-con's twitter feed that one of the hotels next door is onto many of the attendees who thought they were being sly by registering at the hotel via another event that same week.

This Hyatt has historically been one of the main places to stay during Comic-con, primarily filled up by professionals and creators. This year they took themselves off the list as they are hosting a completely different event involving professionals in the health care industry. The event includes such speakers as Al Gore. Many con attendees thought they were being smart by registering for rooms during the con via the health event's website.

The San Diego Manchester Hyatt and the con's organization basically put everyone on alert today that they are onto the scammers and those reservations will be canceled.

Only smart nerds could see that action coming a mile away.

Also on this topic and as a public service announcement, the last day available of the con, Sunday July 25th, is just about sold out. Last check confirmed about 94% of the passes for the day are sold. Very last chance for anyone to get in this year.

Update: SDCC's New Hotel reservation process...

...was pretty damn slick! Kudos to Travel Planners and SDCC's organization for finally putting together a process that worked.

Main site did not crash. Form was easy to complete (provided you had all 12 Hotel choices ready) and submission went through without any delay.

Of course now all those attending have to play the waiting game to see what choice they end up with but the fact that we didn't have to call and re-call over and over for hours just to get through to a human because of a site crash as in years past was wonderful.

I would imagine the bulk of the hard core attendees will all be done applying for rooms within the first hour of the offering.



UPDATED! Final results later in the day...

So the Bittergeeks both submitted for reservations at the same time in seperate locations and we each received very different results.

Both of us completed and submitted hotel res form within six minutes of the opening of the online system. Maybe within one minute of each other.

One of us received confirmation within two hours and obtains first, best hotel choice desired. Cool!

The other receives confirmation six hours later and doesn't even get any of the tweleve hotel choices submitted. Ended up with some crap hotel randomly assigned that's over 3 miles from con. Wow. Not cool.

Guess which location we are keeping.

So while the submission process itself worked well by all accounts, clearly there were shenanagans behind the scenes. Can't believe the timestamp on our submissions (one minute apart) were equally catered to by Travel Planners. The swing from best to worst location is too crazy.

SDCC '10: Hotel Hell Day Arrvies on the 18th

If you plan on attending Comic-con this July and need a hotel you need to check out the official site before the 18th. Reservations open at 9am PST sharp on Thursday. There is a new process in place for this year's reservation system and in all seriousness, it sounds like they have a better plan in place than in previous years. Certainly less chaotic. Providing of course, it plays out as described and the servers don't crash.

Full Details from Travel Planners:


Given the number of hotel rooms available for the number of participants attending, we know how challenging booking a room for Comic-Con can be. For this reason, we have implemented a new process that we hope will streamline the reservations process.


Comic-Con 2010 Hotel Reservations
- A User's Guide
Our goals for this year's Comic-Con hotel reservations system are to ensure simultaneous accessibility for all, while maintaining genuine first-come, first-served service -- down to the millisecond. In the past 12 months we've worked hard to develop a system to achieve these goals. Thus, we've made changes to the process for this year and we wanted to give all of you an advanced heads up on how to have the best possible reservations experience.

The hotel reservations service will open on March 18th, at exactly 9:00am Pacific Time. Look for the hotel link to be posted on the Comic-Con website at that time. When you click through, you'll be taken to a reservation preference information page. You'll need to enter 12 hotel choices, in order of preference, so please preview the list of hotels and have your choices picked out in advance. Other information needed includes occupant names, arrival & departure dates, and your contact information, including email. When you hit submit, your information will be time stamped and logged into our database.

Within 3-5 hours from the time you hit submit, an email will arrive from "res@tphousing.com" confirming which hotel was available and reserved for you. The email will include instructions on how to provide your credit card deposit to confirm the reservation. For reservations of 10 or more rooms, please allow 3 business days for the email to arrive.

Additional Considerations:
You'll need to provide a deposit equal to one night's room charge plus tax within 5 business days of receiving your confirmation.
Reservations without deposit payment information on file after this time will automatically be cancelled.
This deposit is fully refundable if your reservation is canceled by May 14, 2010.
Reservations canceled May 15th through June 17th will incur a $75 cancel fee.
The entire deposit becomes non-refundable if reservations are canceled on or after June 18, 2010.