san diego comic con 2007

For over a decade we’ve been chronicling the agony of getting a hotel room for San Diego, and this year’s fret spree seemed to find new ways to be stressful. As we’re writing, the admission letters are going out, and it’s like the lottery scene from The Hunger Games for tension and FOMO. For some reason, I got a room—I got one last year but got shut out the year before, so it all seems random in the end. Time stamps, forms that didn’t load, fate, destiny…for some reason this year has has more anxiety about how it was going to work out, and as the selection of tweets below show, a sense of humor is a good thing to be armed with.

The thing about the hotel room sprint is that it isn’t random—like the badge lottery—or selective—like getting a pro badge or a press badge or an industry professional badge. You can marshal evidence or get a testimonial to get those things. But not so a hotel room.

No, getting a hotel room is a physical and mental race against the clock. You need to have Nolan Ryan’s fastball, Ronda Rousey’s reflexes and Edward Snowden’s keyboard skills. It’s the ultimate test of nerves for nerds.

But some may wonder, just how short IS the window to get a room downtown? I think the notification that downtown hotel rooms are gone usually starts within about 10 minutes, but the timestamp needs to be a lot shorter than that. While there is no definitive way of knowing the answer to what is the magic time stamp—short of hacking into Travel Planners— the Unofficial Comic Con blog ran a survey of attendees vis a vis their hotel longings, and we’ve taken the results of the questions “How long, including initial load time, did it take you to submit your form?” and made a chart. Oh yeah we did.
SDCC_hotel_times.png
560 people answered this question so while it’s a sample, it’s a decent sized one. As you can see, most people are in and out in under three minutes, with most within two minutes. That’s about the length of the Ramones classic “Blitzkrieg Bop” so you may want to use that as a training guide for next year.

Anyway, if you’ve been thinking you don’t have long to get that form filled out and submitted…you’re right.

Oh yeah and here’s the twitter reaction.


https://twitter.com/Crazy4ComicCon/status/581284173018591233