It goes without saying that trying to book a hotel room for Comic-Con this year was frustrating for many who tried calling or going online for a room.
Comic-Con has been in close contact with Travel Planners, and they wanted us to relay to you the following:
Wednesday, we watched our servers go nuts when the Comic-Con hotel program opened. Many of you suffered the effects, and we apologize for the inconvenience and frustration. We are sorry that our efforts to prepare over the past year fell short. We are taking into account all of your comments and suggestions that have been posted to the blog. We are conferring with Comic-Con and will make every effort to ensure that this will not happen in the future.
We should point out that Travel Planners made significant upgrades and improvements to their system after 2007, both online and in their phone system. Comic-Con thought that the upgrade would be sufficient. Clearly, this was not the case.
Travel Planners told us that in the first five seconds of the site going live on Wednesday, they experienced three times the number of people requesting rooms as they had last year.
Also in the first five seconds, the site had the same number of people requesting a room as there were rooms available. So, while we were prepared for more people, we were not prepared for three times as many people and were certainly not prepared for as many people to call/log on as there were rooms available.
We are working with Travel Planners and their vendors to change the way we handle housing because, as we can all see, it is not working in its current form.
There are only 9,800 rooms within a 1.5 mile radius of the San Diego Convention Center and Comic-Con is only allocated 6,100 rooms in our block, mainly in this radius. We have a few rooms in hotels in Coronado and Mission Valley and those locations still have availability.
We will continue to add rooms throughout the year as they become available. Many people cancel rooms they booked on Wednesday and those rooms will go into inventory, so please continue to check back.
We thank you for all your comments on this blog. One of the purposes of it was to allow us the opportunity to hear your own experiences directly, so we can better ascertain what the problems are in the hotel reservations process. We particularly appreciate those of you who wrote in and offered your own advice and experiences. We take all of your comments seriously.
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