Hotelpocalypse is almost upon us, and soon, the Comic-Con Gods (and time stamps, whatever) are going to determine your fate. When placements are revealed, thousands of attendees will be scratching their heads, wondering, “How did I end up at that hotel?”

So, for fun (and to keep you more informed), we’ve broken down the numbers on hotel rooms at all of the hotels in the Comic-Con hotel block. It’s important to note that these are total number of rooms, and at most if not all the hotels, a certain percentage of rooms is left out of the room block – though those rooms not in the hotel block often go for insane rates (looking at you, Hilton Bayfront). Even if we knew what that percentage of non-room-block rooms was at one hotel, there’s no guarantee it’s the same at each hotel – so we’re just going to suggest you subtract at least somewhere around 10% from these numbers, and take all of this with a grain of salt. But, it’s an interesting experiment anyway.

For downtown hotels only, there are 11,823 room total (down slightly from 2,139 rooms in 2019) – with the Manchester Grand Hyatt (1,625 rooms), the San Diego Marriott Marquis and Marina (1,360 rooms), and the Hilton San Diego Bayfront (1,190 rooms) being the only hotels to feature over 1,000 rooms. The Hard Rock Hotel has 420 rooms and the Omni San Diego Hotel has 511 rooms – meaning it’s not hard to imagine both the why and how of why those rooms get snatched up so quickly.

Here’s a look at the breakdown by hotel:

We’ve combined all the other areas (Airport, Coronado Island, Mission Valley, and Shelter Island) into one list. Of those, only the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina offers over 1,000 rooms (1,053 to be precise) – though Town & Country comes in close with 940.

There are 6,009 rooms total in 2022 (down from 7,564 in 2019) at these non-downtown hotels – which we’ll be honest, we were a bit surprised to see is less than the number of rooms downtown. However, these are only rooms in the hotel block negotiated by CCI, meaning there are any endless number of both hotels and rooms available outside the system.

Here’s a look at the breakdown by room:

Even assuming that most folks in town for San Diego Comic-Con are going to be rooming with other attendees, and that some get their rooms outside the system, there are only 19,703 total rooms available in the hotel sale (and that’s best case scenario, if every single room at each of those hotels was made available to attendees – and we’re very sure that’s not the case). There are well over 130,000 attendees, and while 19,703 isn’t a lot to squeeze them into, it becomes even more difficult when most of them want to stay downtown. That’s why every year after the cancellation deadline, there are still hotels available in Mission Valley and the Airport. It’s not that attendees can’t find somewhere to stay, it’s that it’s just not downtown.

Math is hard, but it’s not hard to see why Hotelpocalypse has become the monster that it has: Supply and demand, baby.