Reservation Hesitation

I spent the better part of two hours today dealing with the on-line hotel reservation system for the San Diego Comic-Con. What a nightmare! Nothing like 100,000 people trying to get a room at the same time to slow a system to a crawl. But if that was the only issue I could have lived with it. But after taking twenty minutes to just pull up the freakin' page and another ten minutes to select my hotel and verify that there were rooms available, the system repeatedly blew me off with a "Page Not Found" error.

Eventually I got through on the phone line. It only took an hour and 45 minutes of solid dialing, hanging up and redialing to get through. By then the room I should of had booked an hour and twenty minutes earlier was gone and I had to settle for hotel I have not stayed at before.

Not that there were not alternatives to the Con-promoted system. I did find a site that listed all the hotels in the area and if they were sold out or not. They all were except for the U.S. Grant. You could book a room at the Grant immediately, outside of the Con system at only $760 a night, or basically four-times the cost of a room at the Holiday Inn through the system. The people who run the Grant ought to be ashamed of themselves. I stayed at the Grant a few years ago, but after seeing their outrageous pricing today I will never stay there again.