Comic-Con May Leave San Diego Due To Price Gouging (forbes.com) 58
"For 55 years, San Diego Comic-Con has been offering fans and aficionados of all things comic and movie related a place to meet, gawk, show off, and in general bask in their geekery," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "That may be coming to an end. Due to hotels' price gouging the cost of rooms, Comic-Con may be moving." Forbes reports: "We would never want to leave, but if push came to shove and it became untenable for us, it's something that we would certainly have to look into," said David Glanzer, Chief Communication and Strategy Officer for Comic-Con International, the nonprofit group that puts on SDCC and WonderCon, in a phone interview Monday. "As event planners, we're always contacted by different cities and it would be reckless for us to not at least acknowledge that." Asked if the show was locked in to San Diego for 2025, Glanzer responded, "2025 is when our contract expires, unless something happens before the convention this year. And if so, I imagine we would make an announcement during the show."
The sticking point for the Convention is the behavior of some of the hotels in the area. For decades, SDCC has negotiated block rates for rooms that they offer to out-of-town attendees, exhibitors, professionals and guests at a discount. Typically, the more deluxe hotels within walking distance of the convention center run $275-335/night, and ones further out can be had for as low as $215 through the Con's hotel site for registered attendees. Competition for rooms in the desirable hotels has become so intense that the day the reservations open has become known as "Hotelocapylse."
Recently, Glanzer said some hotels have been making fewer and fewer rooms available in the blocks, knowing they can charge top dollar on the open market. Rates for non-block rooms during Comic-Con weekend at some of the bigger hotels can go for two or three times the ordinary high season rate, and even smaller hotels and Airbnbs in the area charge significantly more to take advantage of the peak demand. Now that opportunistic behavior is threatening to kill the golden goose that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars into the city in a single week. "If attendees opt not to come because they can't afford to stay at a hotel here, they'll go to another convention," said Glanzer. "And if that starts to happen, the studios won't be able to make as big an impact, and it becomes a downward spiral that no one wants to go down. If we can't accommodate the people who want to attend the show then we're in a pretty bad situation."
"I think there is a belief that because we opened the Comic-Con Museum here [in San Diego] and we have always had the show here, that we are anchored to San Diego and could never leave. Well, we don't want to leave, but we've run conventions in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Jose, and they were very successful. I think there are a lot of cities that would want to accommodate us. In my experience with other science fiction cons I have attended, cities would bid for the convention."
The sticking point for the Convention is the behavior of some of the hotels in the area. For decades, SDCC has negotiated block rates for rooms that they offer to out-of-town attendees, exhibitors, professionals and guests at a discount. Typically, the more deluxe hotels within walking distance of the convention center run $275-335/night, and ones further out can be had for as low as $215 through the Con's hotel site for registered attendees. Competition for rooms in the desirable hotels has become so intense that the day the reservations open has become known as "Hotelocapylse."
Recently, Glanzer said some hotels have been making fewer and fewer rooms available in the blocks, knowing they can charge top dollar on the open market. Rates for non-block rooms during Comic-Con weekend at some of the bigger hotels can go for two or three times the ordinary high season rate, and even smaller hotels and Airbnbs in the area charge significantly more to take advantage of the peak demand. Now that opportunistic behavior is threatening to kill the golden goose that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars into the city in a single week. "If attendees opt not to come because they can't afford to stay at a hotel here, they'll go to another convention," said Glanzer. "And if that starts to happen, the studios won't be able to make as big an impact, and it becomes a downward spiral that no one wants to go down. If we can't accommodate the people who want to attend the show then we're in a pretty bad situation."
"I think there is a belief that because we opened the Comic-Con Museum here [in San Diego] and we have always had the show here, that we are anchored to San Diego and could never leave. Well, we don't want to leave, but we've run conventions in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Jose, and they were very successful. I think there are a lot of cities that would want to accommodate us. In my experience with other science fiction cons I have attended, cities would bid for the convention."
Vegas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vegas (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's a pretense. The hotels are reducing the size of the room blocks they're offering to the con so they can sell direct to attendees. That's perfectly legal and ethical, but if they go too far at some point it's in the con's best interest to find a more affordable city.
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I don't think it's a pretense. The hotels are reducing the size of the room blocks they're offering to the con so they can sell direct to attendees. That's perfectly legal and ethical, but if they go too far at some point it's in the con's best interest to find a more affordable city.
Yep, no reason both sides of the transaction can't make rational decisions.
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The fly in the ointment is that the city is 100% on the conventions organizers' side, and will be strongarming the hotels - again. This is a repeat of the last contract renewal. And the city has a great deal of raw power over hotel operations. The hotels just need to be reminded of it from time to time.
Re: Vegas (Score:5, Informative)
I live here. The issue is a simple one. The convention has outgrown the city. The city was unable to get enough votes and deal with legal issues surrounding expanding the convention center. Vegas has no such issues.
There will be a high speed train going from LA to Vegas in a few years. They would be dumb not to move it, unless Gloria can convince the hotels to stop the gouging.
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I live here. The issue is a simple one. The convention has outgrown the city. The city was unable to get enough votes and deal with legal issues surrounding expanding the convention center. Vegas has no such issues.
There will be a high speed train going from LA to Vegas in a few years. They would be dumb not to move it, unless Gloria can convince the hotels to stop the gouging.
When that high speed train starts going to Vegas and the attendees all ride it on a "special run" (perhaps), will that Special Run then be called The Looney Tunes Express ? /s
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There will be a high speed train going from LA to Vegas in a few years.
And practical fusion is only 20 years away, along with desktop Linux powered flying cars.
That high speed rail is nothing more than California's way to buying union votes. The odds of it every actually operating are very, very slim. And LA is still two hours or more away from San Diego.
They would be dumb not to move it, unless Gloria can convince the hotels to stop the gouging.
The organizers are unpaid locals (and always have been). They have no desire to move their baby that far away. They have the full support of the city, and this won't be the first time the mayor personally goes around to the ho
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Nobody wants to go to Vegas. Every convention HATES vegas.
What really needs to happen is for there to be a permanent, year-round, comic-con convention building that just has permanent facilities for comic, anime, gaming, entertainment and tech conventions, and the convention center and convention itself actually operate the hotels.
People don't realize how utterly cramped and gross it is to go to a convention in the USA is now. You pay for shitty hotels, in a shitty unclean convention center, with no transit
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They would get more people flying in from elsewhere if it were in Vegas.
Cheap/subsidized flights.
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They just just say they're moving it to Vegas because that's what they really want to do. No need for all the pretense. Besides, hotels raise prices as demand in the area increases. That's how it's always been and this not unique to ComicCon or San Diego.
Vegas isn't cheap any more. Hotels are almost as expensive as taking a European city break. That's before how expensive everything else has become (I.E. food and attractions), no free parking and lets not even start on how everyone and their dog has a hand out for a tip which adds an additional 20% onto everything...
Even discarding the flight prices, a trip to Paris/Berlin/Madrid would probably be cheaper.
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No, they don't want to move at all. This is, first and foremost, a negotiating tactic, and something they've done every time the contract comes up for renewal for quite a few years now.
But the organizers are unpaid volunteers (at least, unpaid in money; their compensation is all access passes, so they can hang out in the green room with Angelina Jolie and Hugh Jackman). ComicCon San Diego is the largest annual convention in the world run by volunteers, and they have no desire to have to drive four or five h
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Ever been to Vegas? They could run this for the entire four day weekend, with attendees never seeing daylight, no matter who spread out it is. You can walk the entire length of The Strip through the tunnels. And you can easily find anything you need, food, accommodations, drug stores, whatever, again without going outside.
The heat is an issue, but not that big of one.
The biggest obstacle for the unpaid volunteers who run ComicCon is that it's five or six hours away.
It'd also be interesting to see if the Veg
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below?
Some months, *average* daily traffic is more than a time and a half that!
comdex was larger in its ay than comicon.
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They just just say they're moving it to Vegas because that's what they really want to do.
That seems an odd thing to really want to do... many people, including myself, will never go back to Las Vegas again. The hotels are creepy and the surveillance is out of this world.
Hotelocapylse? (Score:2)
Godzilla had a stroke reading this
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Yeah they put it in quotes, which means you know they were talking to the person, asked them to clarify the spelling of the word, and still screwed it up.
Nobody can say that word as spelled.
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As a former Comic Con attendee (Score:5, Informative)
It's been a shitshow for a over a decade. It's just too big. Las Vegas is the obvious choice if you want it to grow, but San Diego is half the reason to go to Comic-Con. It's a beautiful city with tons of cool areas you could go and unwind from the chaos. Las Vegas is a shithole by comparison.
Plus, God help you if you go outside in your costume. It was 117F/47C today in Las Vegas, and that is typical for the summer.
Re:As a former Comic Con attendee (Score:4, Funny)
That's a lie. It's been two decades.
Re: As a former Comic Con attendee (Score:5, Funny)
Whoosh
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You sound like you would fit in well at comic con
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Now THAT was funny.
Re:As a former Comic Con attendee (Score:5, Interesting)
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I used to go to a fan con in Toronto a couple of decades ago. It could never afford the top billed actors from major series, but it was a massively different feel from a commercial con.
In the end, the commercial cons drove it out of business.
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I stopped going when I recognized that it had been turned into a media-centric event where, instead of being for the fans, it was the con marketing the attendees to the media companies as a captive audience that was paying for the privilege of being marketed to.
Me, too. I was there the year they sold their souls to Hollywood. It was the year Angelina Jolie and Hugh Jackman were there. The committee are unpaid volunteers, but they get all access passes, including the green room, to hang out with the celebrities.
They went from insanely fan-friendly to allowing the studios and a-listers to be money grubbing assholes within a couple of years. All the interesting panels (except Cartoon Voices and Quickdraw) disappeared in favor of . . . Bones, which was not, in any way
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+1 dry humor
Re:As a former Comic Con attendee (Score:4, Funny)
Plus, God help you if you go outside in your costume. It was 117F/47C today in Las Vegas, and that is typical for the summer.
Well, if you're a guy that is. If you're dressed as a superheroine your bikini costume is the perfect thing for the heat.
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Even in a bikini, you'll still end up looking like a boiled lobster.
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First off 117 isn't typical, we're in a heat wave. 105 in July is typical. But here's the trick, if you move the con to Vegas DON'T HAVE IT IN JULY.
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Plus, God help you if you go outside in your costume. It was 117F/47C today in Las Vegas, and that is typical for the summer.
Good thing there's no reason to go outside. You can take the tunnels for the entire length of The Strip, without ever seeing sunlight.
Hotels learning from Ticketmaster (Score:2)
"Recently, Glanzer said some hotels have been making fewer and fewer rooms available in the blocks, knowing they can charge top dollar on the open market."
Re:It's called free market economy (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just reduce the demand, which is exactly what the article is suggesting. No reason to get so snarky.
Gee (Score:2)
I wonder why competition isn't forcing prices down?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Space considerations (Score:3)
The big issue is that the San Diego Convention Center is literally the biggest venue in quite a large region. The LA venues are all smaller, and Vegas doesn't have anything approaching SDCC's size. Changing cities will reduce attendance for at least the first year, but even so there's a dearth of places to move to that'll handle the attendance and floor-space requirements.
Perhaps the con should consider changing the time of year, or splitting the con based on subject matter.
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Re: Space considerations (Score:3)
I'm positive Vegas has the infrastructure to handle the number of people. But I'm not really sure it's the same. San Diego has an entire corner of the city that essentially is just tourists. The roads and access are built in such a way to keep them isolated from the local population. So, you end up in an entire neighborhood dedicated to Comic Con. I'm skeptical a Vegas event would provide a similar experience.
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Vegas has the ability to host something that big, but as you not, not in one building. LA could handle it, but the convention center is a horrible neighborhood. Anaheim could handle it, but like Vegas, it's much more spread out - and across the street from Disneyland, and late July is high season for that so competition for hotels space would be fierce, and parking would be far worse than in San Diego (where it's pretty dire).
And the organizers are locals in San Diego, and are unpaid volunteers.
Re: Space considerations (Score:2)
Well, in fact it does, since the population of San Diego is three times that of Vegas. Just not as many tourists.
Also, walkability of Vegas is trash compared to San Diego.
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The LA venues are all smaller, and Vegas doesn't have anything approaching SDCC's size.
Huh?
San Diego Convention Center:
Total space 2,600,000 sq ft (240,000 m2)
Exhibit hall floor 615,700 sq ft (57,200 m2)
Las Vegas Convention Center:
Total space 4,600,000 sq ft (430,000 m2)
Exhibit hall floor 2,500,000 sq ft (230,000 m2)
Move to Boston! (Score:1)
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The reason we can't have nice things: greedy assholes.
Agreed. But one should include the 120,000 attendees in that designation, as well. The hotels (and everyone else) couldn't gouge attendees if there weren't so many of them, and several times as many eager to take their place if they don't show up.
(The only way to reliably get a badge for next year is to go down this year and pre-register. They reserve some for online sales in January, but those are generally sold out within, literally, seconds when they go up. Assuming the web site doesn't crash from the lo
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The reason we can't have nice things: greedy assholes.
Agreed. But one should include the 120,000 attendees in that designation, as well. The hotels (and everyone else) couldn't gouge attendees if there weren't so many of them, and several times as many eager to take their place if they don't show up.
(The only way to reliably get a badge for next year is to go down this year and pre-register. They reserve some for online sales in January, but those are generally sold out within, literally, seconds when they go up. Assuming the web site doesn't crash from the load even faster.)
Not really, that's like blaming fish for being overfished. You can't really blame Comic-Con attendees for there being many of them. The people running these San Diego hotels have a resource, they can gouge it which will eventually drive Comic-Con somewhere else where they aren't gouged. That's called pricing yourself out of the market, or 'a tragedy of the commons' [hbs.edu] if you want a more academic description. Alternatively the San Diego hotels can manage the resource more intelligently and sustainable, invest
Price-gouging... (Score:2)
Spring break is worse (Score:2)
Spring break is worse. At least it was this year. Typical nightly rates were $350-400.
Maybe this dynamic is different due to the large number of room blocks, but compared to spring break, these prices are pretty reasonable for downtown San Diego.
On the other hand, I know my small apartment would go for about $900/night during Comic Con. But that has more to do with AirBnB inflation than it does market rates.
I do know lots of people living downtown who vacate for Comic Con and rent out their places. You can
Salt Lake City (Score:3)
Oops. Maybe not. FanX has taken on a life of its own since the lawsuit. Don't really need an SDCC spinoff.
Princeton MN is the new San Diego (Score:1)