The reservation page was actually optimized!

• Just one image: a banner across the top.
• Everything was on one page, including the list of hotels, the personal info, and the hotel choices.
• Hotel selection was done by client-side scripting, so there was no wait for processing between selections (and no risk of typos confusing their processing system later today).

This is a huge deal, especially compared to Travel Planners’ horribly overdesigned 2008 forms — yes, forms, plural — that kept bogging down. (I never even saw last year’s, though I tried for an hour and a half to get in.)

On the downside, that one page does load a half-dozen script files, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed it down much.

In case none of your 12 choices were available, they asked for a maximum price you’d be willing to pay for another hotel that’s not on your list. I vaguely recall this being a feature of the old fax forms, but I don’t remember being asked this on the phone last year.

I was surprised to find that they didn’t want credit card info immediately, but that’s good from a streamlining perspective as well. The hotel choices, room type, and contact info are critical in order to make the reservation in the first place. Payment can be done later, so in a rushed situation like this, it’s better to handle it later. Plus, not asking for credit card information means that they could run the site without encryption, speeding things up a bit more.

I would have liked to have gotten a confirmation number for the request, or an email, just so that I could be sure that I was in their queue. And to be sure that I entered the right email address. And the right start and end dates. And…well, you get the idea. I’m a little paranoid about the process at the moment.

Here’s hoping that the back end of the process, and sending out confirmations, goes as smoothly as the front end did.

Update: Short answer: it didn’t. Long answer: I’ve written up what went wrong, at least from the guests’ point of view.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** So I selected my third choice. In the 10 seconds between displaying that page and me clicking on it, the room had been reserved. So I went back, picked a fourth choice, filled in my reservation info, filled in my credit card info… and it stalled on the last page of the reservation, showing only the title. Eventually, in desperation, I hit refresh, and it sent me back to the beginning!

So I went through the whole process again. Fortunately, traffic has eased somewhat, and it was only dial-up slow instead of Slashdotted-slow. My fourth choice was no longer available (or else it hadn’t yet released the room I had almost booked), but my third choice was back in the running, and I was able to get it. It turns out that at the point it had stalled the first time through, all I had left was to mark two checkboxes agreeing to the room rate and the transaction, and press a submit button. I finally had a reservation number at 10:04 AM.

Incidentally, it’s very much worth booking through the convention if you can. I spot-checked some prices, and for a double room, the convention price was typically 40–50% less than the price listed on the hotel’s own website, and 30% less than prices through AAA or Travelocity.

Worth re-reading: Suggestions for Comic-Con (here) and Comic-Con By the Numbers (Comics Reporter)

*By this time I was using IE7, because I kept getting the bogus cookie errors on Firefox. I wasn’t sure if it was a server problem or a browser problem, though Firefox is able to get through at least the hotel availability step now, so it was probably coincidence. And I only managed to get past the first step on IE7 because I had the Web Developer add-on, which let me outline where the submit buttons were… because the server was too busy to send the images!

**Last year, they completely sold out within a few hours, and the travel agents practically begged people to let go of extra rooms they had booked “just in case.”

The crunch is amazing. Last year, San Diego’s public transportation system dissolved under the combined assault of 100,000+ Comic Con attendees and a weekend of Padres games. Two years ago, the first year we stayed in town instead of just driving down for Saturday, we booked so late that we were stuck with the Super 8. Just for kicks, I checked the prices there. A room for this coming weekend would cost half what we paid per night on Comic Con weekend in 2004. And their prices during the con this year? I can’t tell, because they’re already sold out.

This morning, Travel Planners (the company handling reservations for the convention) sent out an email to people who had reserved hotel rooms through their service. After assuring me that my reservation was fine, they went on to ask:

In the meantime, we have a favor to ask of you. Please take a minute to reassess the number of rooms that you’ve booked and help your fellow attendees and exhibitors by canceling any rooms that you are not absolutely certain you’ll need.

Like you, we’re all thrilled that Comic Con is growing by leaps and bounds every year, but with each new show it gets more and more difficult to find enough hotel rooms to accommodate so many visitors. Accordingly, every hotel room becomes an integral part of the show’s success.

It’s not uncommon for people to grab multiple rooms just in case more people come, or to keep their options open (say, reserving both an expensive hotel downtown and a less expensive one further out, then cancelling one once they’ve made a decision). I’m astonished that it’s come to the agency pleading with people to let others have a chance at the rooms now, instead of waiting until just before the hotels start charging for cancellations.

On a related note, now’s as good a time to any to link to some recommendations for anyone planning to attend Comic Con:

• Our own Suggestions for Comic-Con still hold up. I’d like to add: don’t forget to pack long pants as well as shorts. It may be July, but San Diego is a coastal city, and it can get cold at night or in the morning.
• The Comics Reporter’s Comic Con By the Numbers has been updated.
• And of course, there’s Aubrey’s Guide to Con Hygiene.