Just over an hour ago at 9 AM PST, there was a whole lot of nerves when the Travel Planners online registration portal for downtown hotel bookings was finally opened.
For the week leading up to the hotel registration, Red Dot Diva was busy hunting down those (very very) rare male virgins for blood sacrifices to the SDCC gods. Also, with @eserei27 at the helm, Red Dot Diva collaborated with her convention roomies by discussing on their strategies, agreeing on the 6 hotels they desired, and got familiarized with the layout of the booking form.
The irony is that most of her roomies are already planning on camping out on Hall H or Ballroom 20 lines, but felt that staying in the downtown hotels would be "more convenient". Strange, but true.
Personally though, Red Dot Diva strongly feel that when carrying out media duties as "press", it is much easier to run to and fro the convention centre and the Hilton Bayfront (where many press interviews and roundtables are held), if she had a downtown hotel booking. Plus, it saves time and energy to have an accessible room when there is an urgent need to dump and pick up stuff in between media junkets, or charge up those digital babies.
This year, hardly anyone faced problems getting on and submitting those requests through the Travel Planners registration portal. The registration process itself was very smooth, with many submitting their bookings within 1 to 3 minutes! For comparison, last year, downtown hotels were all booekd up within 2 minutes.
Red Dot Diva got her registration submitted in about 1 minute. That has got to be one of the most stressful 1 minute in her entire life. Most of her roomies managed to get them through under the 2-minute mark. Whether that speed translates to one of them being able to score a hotel of their choice, remains to be seen. The waiting period for a notification and/ or confirmation of the booking is 2 days.
Based on previous experiences, there would definitely be duplicate names since many friends or roomies have pooled together to submit the hotel registrations, and one of the persons with the double booking would be requested to cancel the registration.
This would mean that several rooms will be released after all these duplicates have been sorted out by Travel Planners. So don't give up hope if you haven't got a room if you are on the waitlist!
Red Dot Diva really really hope those male virgins she "sacrificed" did them a whole lot of good. It's now all up to the SDCC gods.
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