This week’s General Hotel Sale is an on-going tumultuous situation, thanks to the fallout of technical blunders, mis-communications and a seemingly random allocation process, issues stemming from the very opening of the Registration pages at 9am PT (4pm GMT), this last Tuesday 24th.

From the second the links that had been emailed to Member ID holders went live, reports began flooding social media of pages, failing to load; something that already added to a stressful situation as the General Hotel Sale works on a first-come, first-served principle. Once reaching a Registration page, applicants are requested to select six hotels from a list supplied by sale administrators Travel Planners.

The Hotel Sale works with the timestamps of submitted forms: if your form has the earliest timestamp, you are then allocated to the first available hotel room, working down through your selections. If your first selection has been filled already, down to the second, and then the third, and so on until a hotel is found with an available room. So, as you can appreciate, time to fill out your form is of the essence.

The popular consensus is, if you don’t get your form in by at least four minutes, it would be unlikely that you would get a hotel room from any of the selections available, reflective of the sheer demand that Comic-Con attracts. However, with browsers locked into frozen loading pages, applicants were faced with the prospect of not being able to even select any those prized hotel rooms, let alone those coveted Downtown spots.

Things went from bad to worse for many applicants, even when they finally got the forms loaded, as they then found they couldn’t properly select hotels from a drop-down on the page. Confusion, frustration and blame littered Twitter. And still the seconds were counting away.

With incomplete forms being submitted, Travel Planners were faced with a difficult situation, feeling that the best solution was to send out an email to those who had suffered difficulties, an hour or so after the original starting time, stating they would be honouring timestamps and requesting again for hotel selections. It appeared very much like a temporary fix for what had clearly become a troubled technical calamity.

Travel Planners has yet for formerly make a statement about the situation, no doubt waiting until this present situation has come to a complete stop and they can assess exactly what went wrong. Comic-Con International has responded to press enquiries with a blanket statement being sent out, receive by ourselves at AEISD and other outlets:

“We’re obviously disappointed the hotel sale didn’t run as smoothly as we would have liked. Our attendees are very important to us and we have worked very hard to secure more room blocks and reduced rates at area hotels. We continue to strive to provide the best means to accommodate the growing number of people looking for lodging during the show. In fact, one of the major sticking points in our current negotiations to remain in San Diego are hotel rates. This incident has cast a shadow on our efforts but we are working with Travel Planners to ensure this type of situation does not occur again.”

We have, however, also have a number of responses from David Glanzer, CCI’s Director of Communications and Press Relations, to questions which we put to him in an email yesterday:

An Englishman In San Diego: A number of applicants suffered problems with the forms on the Travel Planners site. How soon was any conversation conducted between CCI and Travel Planners from the first reports of issues? Did CCI offer any solutions to TP about resolving these issues? How hands on

were you during this process? David Glanzer: As you know Travel Planners handles the sales of hotel rooms for Comic-Con. We were in the loop as the process began and TP made us aware of issues as they occurred. I should point out that Travel Planners had completed extensive stress testing of the system before housing opened. As I understand it, Travel Planners tested the system at two times the load seen during the 2014 sale and tested it on a number of common browsers. AIESD: The main issue that applicants appear to have was the numerous different responses that TP began to give to them, even from the first reports and the start of the problems. What statement did TP give CCI

as an explanation of what had occurred? What assurances did they give you that things could be recovered? DG: The different responses by TP is something we were not aware of and we’re looking into exactly what happened and why. AIESD: Did CCI ever suggest to TP to scrap this Sale, regroup and run it again, once the dust – and the problems – had been settled and resolved?

DG: That didn’t come up as a possible solution and it may have been because it is our understanding over 70% of those taking part in the sale were able to submit without incident. We are obviously not happy

how things progressed, and while the sale was in progress, CCI and Travel Planners learned of the issue impacting some users. Once Travel Planners was able to review the data a recovery plan was agreed to by CCI and Travel Planners. This plan was designed to ensure people’s place in line was maintained, and that they got to select hotels in order of their preference. AEISD: All indications point to a possible resale on April 8th: will any revaluation be made to the sale process on this sale and beyond?

DG: I don’t know if I would call it a resale however, as in the past, on the 8th inventory that is returned to the block for sale will again be made available to the public on a first come, first served basis.

Like I say, the dust is yet to settle on the entire situation, with offered rooms still to be accepted or denied, and a forthcoming second Hotel Sale due to take place on the 8th April. Kerry Dixon of the San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog has written an emotional yet considered editorial post on the whole sorry affair and Cup O’ Tea guest Violet from Gender Biased Reviews has reported on her experience as a first time gauntlet runner of the Hotel Sale. We’ll be posting our conclusions, including our own experiences, once we’ve discussed them on this weeks Cup O’ Tea Hangout, in which we’ll be discussing the Hotel sale at length. I hope you can join us.

image: rockculture.com

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