Julia Slaughter

Well the dust has settled, and we have emerged victorious!

There are six of us going to Comic-Con this year. Of the six of us, four of us got involved in the frantic hotel scramble (okay well technically three of us were in the system but I mean the happiness of four people was tied into all this nonsense.) So on the morning that the reservations opened – three of us were poised to hit the website until we were in the system. I was one of them.

I was unimpressed when 2 minutes before the reservation system was supposed to open the Comic Con site appeared to be down, in fact it was just moving painfully slow.  Right at 11am my time (9am in San Diego) the system came up and I submitted my information. Those of us going to Comic Con had created a master list of 12 hotels and everything was going great until I hit #7 and couldn’t find it on the list! I kept scanning the list looking for a different incarnation or a second cousin, anything that resembled that hotel and then I panicked and thought I was going to miss getting my name on the list so I moved on and when I got to the 12th spot I blindly picked one.

As usual the system was flawed. Giving credit where credit is due – at least this year we were able to select more than one room along with our list of preferences so that no matter which hotel we got, at least we would all be together. (Last year the four of us who went were at two separate hotels, boo on that.) Before 11:10am the three of us who entered “the lottery” all had our choices in and were comparing notes, nothing to do now but wait.

Panic set it around 45 minutes later. I hadn’t heard ANYTHING and I wondered if I had entered the wrong email address – shouldn’t I at least have a confirmation email to let me know that I was in the system and now it was time to wait. I laughed when I talked to my friends and went to Twitter and discovered I was not alone in my fears. Of course there was still a nagging feeling in the back of my mind – was I really sure that I had entered the correct email address?

I was checking my email every 15 minutes.

About three hours later I got the email from Travel Planners – victory was mine, I got our first choice hotel. (Our first choice hotel was five blocks away, as opposed to all of the hotels that are right next to or right across from the Convention center.) I contacted the guys and they still hadn’t heard anything yet.

They got their emails late that night, the hotels they got were not even on their lists. (They have canceled those reservations as we’re going with the rooms I got.)

I’m thrilled that we have our rooms, but I hate that every year this is a fiasco and I feel for all of my fellow Comic Con attendees who are still struggling with the system.