Over the weekend, we asked our readers to vote for their #1 hotel choice for San Diego Comic-Con, to get a very rough, completely un-scientific idea of what the most popular hotels in Tuesday’s General Hotel Sale will be.
Although several of the results seem like common sense (the closest hotels to the convention center are very popular!), some of the results did surprise us a bit. So first, let’s take a look at the downtown hotels (click for larger):
Most hotels have at least one vote, but the top four (all with over 20 votes) are probably pretty obvious: the Hilton San Diego Bayfront (16.5% of the vote), San Diego Marriott Marquis and Marina (11.9%), Omni San Diego Hotel (8.6%), and the Hard Rock Hotel San Diego (7.16%). These are the four closest hotels to the convention center, meaning the shortest walk, and they’re all also close to the Gaslamp District. Shocking, right?
The next few hotels though show a significant decrease in people’s preference. The Manchester Grant Hyatt clocks in with 30 votes (4.3%), the San Diego Gaslamp Quarter is next with 24 votes (3.4%), and then it drops down to 13 votes for The Bristol Hotel, or 1.86% of the vote.
What does this mean for you though?
As you’re hopefully already aware, when the General Hotel Sale goes live tomorrow, though this year it’s going to run a little differently. At 6AM PT, the site (accessed either through a link on CCI’s site or through the e-mail some have received – hopefully more e-mails are forthcoming) will turn into a randomized waiting room. You’ll have between 6AM-9AM PT to enter, than at 9AM PT, we’ll all be randomly scrambled into an order to be let through to fill out the form.
onPeak (formerly Travel Planners) is still assigning rooms based on timestamp (though forms received within three seconds of each other are considered to have arrived at the same time and will be processed in a random order within that three-second grouping), but the randomization is going to determine a lot of what your timestamp is, since the random order determines if you get in at 9:02AM or 9:32AM. Also, unlike previous years, we’ve got no idea anymore what constitutes a “good submission time”, as we have no idea how fast or slow they’re letting attendees through, and likely won’t have any idea until we see what hotels attendees wind up with on Friday and compare (and look for another poll later this week for that!).
All of that is to say, this year is a big, giant question mark in a lot of places. However, we can still offer a few recommendations.
Since onPeak presumably tries to slot you into your order of preferred hotels (if the first one’s full, they’ll move on to the second), we recommend that on your list of six, you select at least one hotel that isn’t one of the top six hotel choices above. Our theory being that if most people are going to choose those six, at least by choosing a slightly less popular option, you’ve got a potentially higher chance of getting it.
We also asked our readers to rank their most popular options in Mission Valley (unsurprisingly, Town and Country came in at #1 with 17.6% of the vote, followed by the the Doubletree by Hilton San Diego Mission Valley (10.36% of the vote), and the other areas (Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina proved popular with 16.47% of the vote, followed by the Holiday Inn San Diego Bayside with 9.41%.
