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San Diego Comic-Con General Hotel Sale (Live Inventory) Recap: Well That Was a Thing

Omni hotel interior wraps

With Hotelpocalypse behind us, it was time today (on April 24) for the final Comic-Con hotel event: the live inventory sale, or the General Hotel Sale.

This sale includes any remaining rooms, whether they’re for downtown, Mission Valley, Hotel Circle, Coronado Island, or by the airport. In addition, hotels from outside the downtown area but not offered as part of the Early Bird pre-pay option were also added into the mix. This means that those looking to stay outside of the Gaslamp but not wanting to pre-pay for their entire stay upfront only had one option: This sale.

As hotel rates climb higher and higher on the open market, securing a room through the locked-in rates that Comic-Con International provides becomes more important than ever.

So, many turned their eyes to the General Hotel Sale. Comic-Con had not given a lot of information about this particular sale — just the date (listed on both an email they sent out and the website) and a time (9am PT, listed only in the email, which not everyone received).

We assumed — incorrectly, clearly — that it would work like last year, in which there was a waiting room around 8am. This was not the case, however. Instead, people who had the link already (whether from the email or from Twitter) tried refreshing, waiting to see what would happen.

This changed at 10:51am, when the link changed to this screen:

However, people who had already loaded the Early Bird link were still able to keep refreshing — though no inventory ever showed up here. More on that later.

Finally, at 8:57, we did get a waiting room after all. All links turned into a waiting room:

But here’s where things went off the rails. So let’s take this one at a time.

Booking Early

For those with an onPeak login, somewhere around 8:55am, if they logged in, they were able to see inventory — and book early. Now, there are only two ways to have an onPeak login at this point, as they remove any previous logins after each con. So you either booked a reservation earlier this year (either through Early Bird or the Downtown Hotel Sale), or you at least got assigned a room in the Downtown Hotel Sale or you logged in to view your assigned hotel, even if you didn’t accept it, and setup a password then.

Again, this only worked sometime after 8:50am, but it did work.

There have been reports in previous years of those with reservations already overriding their previous reservation when they use the same onPeak login, so we’ve always advised people to use a new login if going for a second room or trying to help a friend — but maybe this is the way to go.

Errors, Errors, & More Errors

Quickly, people started reporting errors, including getting kicked out of the waiting room:

A 406 page:

Or other errors:

Clicking the link directly from the hotel email from Comic-Con or from the Hotels  page on their website (which was only updated AFTER the start time, by the way, not before) seemed to work for some, but not everyone:

Some Success

Still, many reported they were able to make it through and get what they wanted (or at least a hotel room)

Finally, at 8:44am, all downtown hotels were gone except for a few scattered days here and there — though as of publishing, there are still a few further out hotels still available.

So Now What?

A large number of attendees – 21% according to our other very unscientific poll — are still without a room after today’s sale.

But for those who can still wait, there are still options.

As always, you can book outside the system.

The other option is to just keep checking. Rooms will continue to be added to inventory, all the way up to the convention because they are every year. When a hotel room is returned, it goes back on sale — and last year there were also times when lots of hotels would pop up, which possibly indicated that CCI could have added additional rooms to the room block. The best resource for checking hotels is @SDCCHotelTrackr on Twitter, who posts which hotels are available and the dates available.

If it were us, our suggestion for next year would be to try for Hotelpocalypse, and if you get assigned a room you don’t want, to at least make a login. If the system works the same, you could theoretically login early to see inventory early. But, as evidenced by today, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the system will work the same, or that you’ll get any kind of warning if it’s changed.

As always, we’ll just keep trying to do our best to explain it all with the information we have.

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