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10 Years of San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Rates [UPDATE]

With the 2015 General Hotel Sale coming this Tuesday, and the recently released list of hotels and prices per night, we start to see a lot of complaints about how prices for San Diego Comic-Con are once again on the rise. Comic-Con International does their best to keep these rates as low as possible — that’s one of the main hold-ups in why they haven’t signed on to stay in San Diego yet past 2016 — but the fact remains that prices are on the rise. How much have they risen, though?

We created the below chart as a comparison of Comic-Con hotel rates over the past 10 years. The numbers reflect the base price, for 1 person/1 bed per night. As you would expect, there has been a gradual (and sometimes not-so-gradual) upswing since 2005.


Click here
to see the interactive chart on Google.

Just a handful of downtown hotels have been offered in the Comic-Con room block for all 10 years. The Manchester Grand Hyatt, for example, was $175 per night in 2005, and is $282 this year, for the 1 person/1 bed level. That’s a 61% increase. Most other hotels are in the 30%-40% range.

As the convention has grown, fortunately so have the number of hotels in downtown San Diego. One interesting footnote is Hotel Solamar, which was built in 2005 but not offered in the SDCC room block until 2009. It was originally priced in the $350/night range for 2 years, until it came down in cost and is $285/night this year.

Of course, hotel prices aren’t the only things that have been risen over the last decade. Back in 2005, a four-day with Preview Night badge would have clocked you $50 if you pre-paid. Today, it will cost you $220 — an increase of 340%. So, comparatively, hotel prices might not look so bad.

[UPDATE] Check out these scans of the hotel information pages from the 2007 Comic-Con brochure. It’s interesting to see how few hotels were needed back then. (Scans by Francis Yun. Click to enlarge.)

Do these numbers surprise you? Let us know in the comments.

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