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Hotelpocalypse 2025: Everyone’s Least Favorite Sale

Well, another year down, another Hotelpocalypse (mostly) over.

The annual hotel sale—now rebranded as the Downtown Hotel Sale—is essentially a lottery system for scoring a room at Comic-Con’s discounted convention rates. Without it, attendees face steep alternatives: paying over $1,000 per night for top-tier hotels, booking far outside downtown, or endlessly refreshing the booking site hoping to catch fleeting live inventory. It’s no surprise, then, that so much of the Comic-Con experience hinges on this moment — but year after year, it remains an exhausting, stress-inducing hurdle.

And this year we got an earthquake in the middle of it, which felt very appropriate.

This year saw a few changes, the biggest of which being that this sale is now truly downtown only. While the majority of attendees were surely always trying for downtown (and likely the main reason behind the change), it does mean that there were substantially fewer hotels up for grabs today.

But let’s get into the nitty gritty and break all of this down for 2025.

The Waiting Room

On Wednesday, April 9, thousands of San Diego Comic-Con attendees filled out the form with their preferred placements. There were two relatively large changes this year: As just mentioned, the biggest of which is that this sale is now only downtown. Previously, it included all hotels, including Mission Valley, by the airport, Coronado Island, etc. This means that any non-downtown hotels are now only available in Early Bird (which is prepaid and with no refunds) or the live inventory sale (set of April 24). That means that there were fewer hotels in general up for grabs today.

The second biggest change is that while previously attendees could select up to five rooms to book at once, that lowered to just two this year. At first glance, this may not seem like a big change, but we heard from several attendees that this impacted them — after all, let’s say you had ten people who always tried to book five rooms at once, and then each room would go to two people. Previously, only one of those ten people would have needed to get a good booking and the entire group would be covered. Now, five people would need to get a good booking to cover the entire group. Again, we don’t think this impacted a huge swath of attendees, but we know it impacted at least some.

Beginning at 8am PT, attendees could enter the waiting room. This was all very business-as-usual for anyone who has done this sale before — to the point were some were even questioning if it was too normal.

 

Submitting Your Choices

Then at 9am PT, the lottery kicked off, and attendees were greeted with the dreaded “little green walking man”. As attendees were let through to the form in order to submit their choices, as always, there were a few frustrating technical difficulties for some — including a “You have left the waiting room” message.

For the most part though, the sale went off well, with many reporting that they made it through almost immediately or in the first few minutes.

As you can see from the above poll, we had 21% who reported gaining access to the form in less than 2 minutes, 16% in 2-4 minutes, 16% in 4-6 minutes, and then 47% at 6+ minutes.

So the majority were at 6+ minutes — but how did they fare overall? Well, that all depends on the actual hotel placements.

Hotel Placements

Just like with the last few years, there was only one round of placement emails, which began going out at roughly 9:06am PT on the morning of Monday, April 14. Emails went out for several hours, with the “you received no placement” emails being held for Tuesday, April 15.

Early on, most attendees reported being assigned one of the hotels they ranked. We have long been suspected that confirmation emails are sent out in the order forms were processed — supposedly based on when each person accessed the form. Whether that’s truly how it works remains anyone’s guess.

It wasn’t long, though, before folks were no longer receiving their first choice.

And then, of course, there were the truly poor souls — the ones who received no email (but who will presumably get the “no placements available” email on Tuesday). If this is you, just remember that the live inventory sale will open on April 24 and there are always hotels in this sale (including, yes, downtown!), though they go fast. If you don’t want to wait until then, there are also still a few Mission Valley/Hotel Circle hotels available now at the Early Bird offer (they are prepay).

Timestamps

As always, making sense of this is kind of an impossible task.

The way the Downtown Hotel Sale is supposed to work, according to Comic-Con International and onPeak, is that the “order in which requests are processed will be based on the time a guest was granted access to the form. No further randomization will take place throughout the process.”

And as always, there is lots of confusion, as people with seemingly good times (such as three minutes) receiving nothing, while others with 4 to 5 minutes still receiving hotels. Like how do you explain the below — someone at 5 or 6 minutes getting Hard Rock, while someone at three minutes got nothing? And the simple answer is: We can’t.

As always, it’s likely an apples-to-oranges situation. Variables like bed type, travel dates, number of rooms requested, and the fallback option selected if none of your top choices were available all impact how inventory is assigned. It’s also possible that some — if not many — are misinterpreting or overestimating the accuracy of their timestamps.

So what does all of that mean?

The real answer is that for the most part, the sale seems to work the way it’s supposed to. Almost everyone who reported they got in “immediately” (in two minutes or less) seem to report receiving a placement, with the fastest getting the best placements.

After that… it’s all sort of a guessing game. However, with much fewer inventory (simply by virtue of having fewer hotels with only Downtown), how did it impact overall placements?

Well, here are the results for this year vs last year:

  • I got a hotel placement
    • 2024: 34.8%
    • 2025: 34.7%
  • Received no placement
    • 2024: 46.9%
    • 2025: 50.2%
  • I did not participate
    • 2024: 18.2%
    • 2025: 15.2%

Here is a closer look at this year’s results:

And it appears… it barely made a difference at all. Now, none of this is scientific. Our pool here is less than 2,000 people each year, which is only a small fraction of SDCC attendees and those who participated in the sale — but it should still be a decent sample size.

I won’t lie, I was surprised to see how close these numbers are to last year, as it “feels” more bleak than previous years based on social media — but hotel room availability has been on the decline for several years now. One of the best (if not the single best) thing that Comic-Con does is work with the city and the San Diego Tourism Authority to lock in lower rates for attendees, guaranteeing rooms. Fewer hotels have been signing up, something Comic-Con International finally admitted last year, though it had been obvious for longer than that.

Hotels have realized that they can make more money on the regular market, upcharging rooms at a premium. There is reason to be optimistic though. While we understand the majority of attendees want downtown rooms, that’s never been possible. There simply aren’t enough downtown hotel rooms available to house everyone. Compared to last year though, when all the Early Bird hotels had very low inventory prior to that sale ending, right now there are still rooms available. We’re hopeful that means that the live inventory sale on April 24 may not be a total bloodbath, and fewer attendees will need to Frankenstein together multiple reservations. Basically: If you’re willing to stay further out and take advantage of Comic-Con International’s wonderful free shuttle service, we think this year should be easier to score a room than last year.

Anyway. Back to results! 

As always, the list of possibilities is pretty much the same that we say every year, but let’s go over them.

Human Error on the Attendee Side: It’s entirely possible that there was an issue with some forms, or that people are misjudging their timestamp. The day of the Downtown Hotel Sale is generally chaos, and remembering to manually glance at a clock to see your timestamp (assuming your clock is even accurate) just doesn’t seem like the most important thing in the heat of the moment. So, many people could have a false sense of their timestamp. It’s also entirely possible you entered in a hotel wrong on your placement list (even easier this year with the hotels listed by bed type), and that’s why you got placed further out than you wanted.

Selection: This is a big one. Many of us like to treat every hotel form and every downtown placement as the same, but dates, room type, number of people, number of rooms, and hotel selection preferences all affect availability.

Basically, we just don’t think any of these variables really matter that much. The more likely answer, for us at least, is that it’s a combination of several things — including inventory, and the onPeak of it all.

But let’s move on to the next theory:

onPeak Human Error: The most common theory about how onPeak assigns hotels is that employees are sitting there doing it by hand. We don’t know this for sure, but it would certainly make more sense than all assignments being from a program — after all, a computer could probably get the first round of placements done in just a few hours.

Rather, most people think that they probably batch the timestamps into a set number (let’s say 2,000 entries at a time, broken down into batches of 200 — again, all made up numbers!), and then assign those to employees to begin trying to find placements that match what was requested. Some employees are always going to get through their stack faster than others, which could potentially explain some of the timestamps and placement discrepancies. They also could misread your form or misclick something, or any number of possibilities.

Basically, you’re never going to get a clear answer on what’s happening here. There are always going to be weird, unexplainable discrepancies — but for the most part, the system works like it should. Meaning that the vast majority of those with early timeslots got hotel placements, and the earliest of which mostly got downtown.

There are simply more people who want downtown hotels than can be placed downtown, and thousands of attendees are left disappointed every year because of it.

The good news is, the live inventory sale is coming, and there are ALWAYS hotels for this sale. Returned inventory from those who cancel their hotels for whatever reason, etc. all wind up back on the waitlist, for those to grab. It will open on April 24.

You can, of course, also always book outside the system. And with the trolley, free Comic-Con shuttle, rideshare, and other options, staying outside of downtown has never been more convenient.

Just remember: Even if you didn’t get the hotel you wanted this year, there’s always next year.

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