The city may undercount the money spent, but whether they do or not is somewhat debatable, too — comics fans are notoriously reluctant to spend money outside of the show and hotel rooms are either not used or shared and there’s a limit to them. And so on. Mostly I’m not really sure why that’s important. Do the other conventions get breaks based on their per capita spending that CCI doesn’t? Do they open up a special reservations hotline to Oceannaire when the bio/pharma convention hits town? I’m not sure what the return is supposed to be.

I guess you could say that the reputation of the con bringing far less to the city than it really brings money-wise fuels a general contempt from the locals, but 15 years of witnessing the most horrible, fundamentally anti-social behavior from comics fans while in San Diego makes me think that if you’re engaged at all with the con you or a friend probably has a personal anecdote that trumps any vague feeling you might have received from trickle-down off of convention bureau statistics. On the whole I’ve had enormously positive experiences with locals while functioning in a normal manner, and (surprise!) less positive experiences when I was acting like a jackass. No one in my wider circle of friends every got it from a local when they weren’t, say, urinating outside a hotel or leaving their tip in the water glass. And since I’m no longer 12, I don’t care what the hotel clerk says to the other one about our Sapphire and Steel costumes when we leave the lobby.

So for me: Like the con, like the city!

“Mission Valley La Quinta Inn, single, next to the laundry.”

“…Plus a bootleg copy of the next three issues if Miracleman, which I stole from the lavatory of Jonathan Ross.”

“…

This pleases me. Go thou now to the Presidential Suite at the Hyatt, and give thy keys to the valet.”

http://www.playthings.com/blog/390000439/post/1580016158.html

It’d be worth staying in Anaheim if this could happen.

As Heidi notes, it’s basically a lottery though. So the other alternative is to acknowledge that and do it via a time-distributed lottery system that removes the chokepoint. Two possibilities;

1) You register over a several week period, entering your personal info sans credit card when you register. At time X, the system takes all the entered registrations and randomly orders them. Emails then go out to, say, the first 200 saying their hotel selection and credit card entry time will be date Y at 0900. Emails go to the next 200 saying their time will be at 0910. Continue until all are assigned a time. The email includes a unique password they use to get into the system, and said password is deactivated once a reservation is made.

2) Distribute it even further. Register as above, but also rank all of your acceptable hotel choices. The lottery program selects the first person, makes their hotel reservation, then selects the second person, and so on. If your first choice is taken when your name comes up, it checks if your second choice is still available, and so forth. You get an email giving you a day or two to go to a site to confirm and enter credit card info.

These aren’t particularly hard to code. I’m sure you could find open source types to do it for, say, getting priority on hotel booking and/or a line pass to Hall H/Room 20.

A medical/pharma show would be $80/night just on dinner with the companies wooing potential customers.

The fact that the CVB doesn’t engage with the show on their website is kinda troubling, but not at all surprising.

As for me, assuming I go (2-3 year wait on exhibitor space puts a chill on my enthusiasm), I’ll do what I’ve done every year since moving out of SD and book a hotel on the internet then trolley in to downtown (though you can park in Little Italy for 5 bucks all day and then move to another spot if you’re feeling brave.)

Also, I did a little math: $300/night times 16,000 comes to $4.8 million per night, or $19.2 million for four nights. So the hotels get the lion’s share of that $32M leaving less than $13M for everyone else. Including the hotel bars, which I suspect get most of that remainder.

And unless I miss my guess, that $32 does NOT include any of the exhibitors (and perhaps not even the event-licensed food vendors) inside the Convention Center, who are mostly from out of town. SDCC, being the type of consumer-oriented show where attendees buy stuff at the show, is different from a trade show such as CES where the focus is making deals and showing off products to be sold elsewhere. As such, it can never be as good a deal for the locals.

In the past I’ve thought the show should move to Vegas, but — have you ever been to Las Vegas in July? Yarrg! You can’t even perspire — the dry air sucks the moisture straight out of your skin. (Although ironically I am going there in July, for a political conference, although it’s in a hotel and I plan to never leave there during the daytime.)

Seriously, there must be some racket to the hotel thing. It smacks of a dirty scheme somewhere. I don’t understand why it is so hard to book rooms– good rooms or otherwise- year after year.

No…no…it can’t be…THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE! Wauughhhhhh!

I ended up with a room at the resort on Shelter Island (but I drive anyway, so no big deal to me).