San Diego Comic-Con 2026 is only 259 days away and things are heating up! The online open badge sale is Saturday November 15th at 9 am PT – this is the only way for new attendees to get a highly coveted badge and there will be broken hearts and jubilant surprises galore.
And guidelines for this year’s hotel room sale – called Hoteloween here at the Beat but Hotelpocalypse by the internet at large – have just been released And in 2026….it’s changing.
Instead of waiting months to find out if you got the room of your dreams, you will now be taken – via random selection – to a live inventory page where you can just pick your hotel room. You have to get your credit card information in and if your room is gone by the time you hit enter…you have to start over again.
The current hotel lottery was more a true lottery – once you got in the waiting room you would watch a little man walk slowly across the screen for what seemed like hours, then be taken to a selection screen where you could pick up to a dozen hotels at your leisure. While this was less stressful it was also more chancey – hotel confirmations would not be sent out for weeks, leaving attendees in a liminal state of unknowing.
This is a lot like the way SDCC hotel rooms used to be allocated – you got into the hotel selection room in the order that you entered the site and had to race the clock to get your picks in. This was a stressful, tense experience for all who participated and you needed good reflexes, a good wifi connection and a PLAN. I had great good fortune for many years, but missed out a few times.
Kerry Dixon of the SDCCBlog, had her own thoughts on the matter:
This is a major shift, and one we’re frankly a little afraid of, but… we’ll see how it goes.
And that brings us to the other seismic changes to the system. Once you book your room, you have to put down a NON-REFUNDABLE TWO NIGHT DEPOSIT. And there is a rather ominous note:
IMPORTANT: The credit card used for the General Hotel Sale must remain valid through the duration of Comic-Con 2026. Please make sure the credit card you use to book your hotel expires in August 2026 or later.
This seems to be aimed at people who don’t notice when their CC expires, but it also suggests that maybe you have to have the SAME credit card for the room the whole time?
What I’m getting at is that between the no-refundable deposit and (theoretical) one credit card rule, the end result would be a crack-down on the very common practice of room trading. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Grabbed an extra room for a pal. The pal doesn’t go, and the room is offered to someone else who didn’t get a good hotel room. Stressful, but it always seems to work out and everyone gets a room they more or less like.
It’s also a blow to groups who all try to get a room separately – whoever gets the best one takes that and the rest are cancelled. This is a very common practice and it just got a lot more complicated.
Generally speaking this means you gotta make up your mind a lot earlier. No more “Ohhhhh, I might go.” A two-night deposit is anywhere from $600-800 and many folks won’t want to take the hit on that.
On the one hand, I can see why these changes make sense. San Diego hotels are getting more and more touchy about having to honor the hotel room discounts that the con offers. I’ve reported on this endlessly for years, but in an open market, hotels would charge $500-1000 a night for rooms, which average con goers (let alone comics creators) can’t afford. And more San Diego hotels are reducing the number of rooms available in the convention block – or pulling out of being available entirely.
Keeping hotel room prices low(ish) is a huge concern of the SDCC showrunners, which came out in public earlier this year. But it’s also a big negotiating point for keeping the con in San Diego. Requiring non-refundable deposits is a way to lessen the stress on hotels and ensure they are booked way ahead of time, so could be a move to keep hotel owners happier.
The live inventory is another matter – the technology is there to make this experience a lot smother, and people have been complaining about not knowing where they got a hotel for years, so this is a good way to placate kvetchers as well.
As for the dates, there will be two hotel room sales, as usual. Per the SDCC website:
| Early Bird Hotel Sale | Fall–Spring | Non-downtown areas | First-come, first-served | Full prepay, nonrefundable |
| General Hotel Sale | Spring | Downtown, Mission Valley, Airport, etc. | Randomized access to live booking | Non-refundable two-night deposit due at the time of booking |
The Early Bird hotel sale is for sensible people and those who just can’t stand the stress of Hotelpocalype. Get a room SOMEWHERE, pay for it and bam, you’re done. See you in San Diego.
After the General Sale, rooms do become available on the site (some people just check regularly and get very good rooms) but the deposit rule change will make giving up rooms FAR less likely.
There is actually one other hotel room sale – for exhibitors – but it is not open to the public, and I can tell you it’s very stressful in its own way, especially the part where you have to put down a $10K deposit on your credit card.
And so, the con doth change once more. Speaking as a former upper-end player in the high-stakes game of SDCC hotel room swapping, we had a good run. Getting a “good” hotel room for the con is the hardest, most dreamed about element of the show. In 2025 I got a hotel I didn’t expect to, but ended up seeing Francisco Lindor’s luggage.
The new system will require more planning and perhaps end up being more fair. Or it could be a hellish mess. People will adapt and the Con, as always, abides.
