Katherine Keller can give you an earful, but it boils down to the fact that elements that have tried to get cons going in Las Vegas inevitably end up not knowing anything about either comics or Las Vegas. The promotion is notoriously bad and the fees charged to exhibitors and guests tended to be atrocious.
Such things kill any momentum or motivation to try large scale cons there.
Not to mention, Las Vegas in the middle of summer is… warm. San Diego has had a few hot conventions, but Vegas is usually 30 degrees worse.

Also, Vegas ain’t a kid-friendly town no matter how much the Visitors’ Bureau might try to say so. If the show were to move anywhere while retaining the third week in July — or, really, any July or August date, I don’t think that any move would be to anywhere but Los Angeles. The Con occurs a couple of weeks into filming of the traditional TV season *and* it occurs smack in the middle of the TCA press junkets. A large part of the reason, IMO, that the studios and actors put up with the 2-hour-ish commute down to San Diego for the Con is due to the weather. Add 20 more degrees of heat in a move to Vegas and it becomes too much of a hassle for *them.* So I think it’d be Los Angeles or nothin’.

Now watch somebody take this post entirely out of its speculative context and try to start yet another “The Con Is Moving to LA — This Time For Sure!” rumor.

— Rob

It’s all part of the mystique of Sandy Eggo Con. And for every person who says they’ll never go again, there are dozens who will take their place. (Sorta like “Hail Hydra!”)

45 minutes for my first year. Not so bad.

Now the closest hotel I have is 5 miles away and across the bloody bay.

This is going to be my last SDCC if you’re still involved next year. I’ll be demanding a full explanation of where my three cc details went, as all three times they apparently went through.

Now I feel much better.

Well, at 12 Central the lines had been open for an hour. The fact you got through (I was still fighting the processing glitch at that point) is a miracle.

Thankfully there was one hotel left on a shuttle route (Best Western) with rooms left so I managed to grab one there. Finally finished at 13:40EST or so. Phones were useless of course. Hopefully some random British guy might see you lot in July!

Having a tiny New York agency run a convention with over 100,000 attendees, pros and guests in this day and age is unquestionable.

Also, I know it was mentioned in jest on the Con blog, but they really really really need to take a good hard look at moving Comic-Con to Vegas. They’d have more than enough hotels amongst other perks of being in a town that easily could handle an event of this size.

I recommend these hotels (and there are something like twenty of them total on either side of the 8 ) for fans because they’re sort of the sweet spot where price meets location. Waaay cheaper than downtown which can be 50-100% more expensive than the Circle hotels, but also close enough to the trolleys and buses that they make the cheaper hotels in outlying areas to the North and East far more trouble than they’re worth, *even* if you’ve got a car (and since I’m flying in, I won’t).

I decided to go a day earlier this year because I noticed over the past couple of years that arriving on Tuesday means that I’m wiped out by Friday.

– Rob

PS: Travelocity has become an unusable pain over the past year. Some idiot apparently decided that breaking it was an improvement.

PPS: Just curious — what are the room rates for the Con Hotels? I assume that they’re out of my price range, but still, just curious.

At those prices, the only way I’d stay in walking distance would be to go with a roommate, so since that’s out I’ll try to find a place a few miles away that’s on the trolley, or maybe I’ll just drive and park somewhere near a shuttle stop.

At least I’m on the shuttle route!

There must be a better way!

The price of a successful Con, I suppose.

I hope everybody got a room…

m.

I’m more relaxed now, but it was nerve-wracking for those 64 minutes. And more than that, I was really annoyed at Travel Planners for not taking any front-end steps to make their site load faster. Even without adding more servers, they could easily have streamlined the site so that it would use less bandwidth, and need fewer back-and-forth requests.