TOPIC: Good Luck to everyone on Housing! How did you do?

My group has VIG and I screwed up and logged on two hours after portal launch and the Westin and Crowne Plaza was sold out of all doubles and queens. The closest available was the Omni, Le Meridian, and the cluster of JW hotels. This has never happened before with VIG. So if you wanted one of those two hotels you had to be on right at noon.

They did not add any new rooms to the portal for today. So even if you had a lottery time of noon you could only get a single king at the Crowne Plaza. The Omni sold out within like 20 minutes.

Appears that from an overall perspective the hotel situation was just slightly better this year. Still, seems pretty brutal to a lot of people.

www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10162134149545259&set=gm.10161621873991902&idorvanity=2246486901

Husband and I got lousy portal times, but due to a fellow TD player who is a gentleman and a scholar, we have a downtown room.

At 1:05 I got one of the last downtown rooms for a friend. I am staying at the JW thanks to a VIG friend.

We didn't bother. Truth be told, the housing stress really sucks all the fun out of GenCon. I actually don't look forward to it anymore. We got friends who are VIG and they can't stop talking about GenCon as soon as badges go up for sale, but they have the worst part, housing guaranteed.
After the disaster of last year, we decided to use the vacation I put aside for GenCon elsewhere and we plan on daytripping up maybe Friday. If we get a hotel, it will be out of town.
That what makes VTD so amazingly awesome, housing is already set!!!

Dave wrote: Appears that from an overall perspective the hotel situation was just slightly better this year. Still, seems pretty brutal to a lot of people.

www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10162134149545259&set=gm.10161621873991902&idorvanity=2246486901

I found this to be quite shocking.

All connected doubles gone with 30 minutes, all downtown rooms gone within 95!

But working backwards, hotel times are spread between 12 and 5 PM approximately it looks like: a 5 hour window.

Around 70,000 people attend Gen Con nowadays, assuming 75% of them travel, and 75% of those are in the hotel lottery that's around 40,000 lottery entrants.

Spread over 5 hours, that's 8,000 people per hour.

According to www.visitindy.com/hotels/features/downtown/ - downtown Indy has around 7,500 hotel rooms, 4,500 of which are connected to the convention center.

Assuming an average of double occupancy, that means 8000 / 2 = 4000 rooms should be gobbled up each hour, and that if the whole inventory were available:

Connected rooms would last till around 1
Other downtown rooms would last till around 2

So at a guess around 1/2 the connected rooms go to VIGs and vendors - which is a lot - but it's just that downtown hotel capacity overall is around 15,000 people among around 40-70,000 people who want it.

It's more than 70,000. I don't remember the number, but I think it's more than 100,000 when include part-timers (and probably including vendors and others who aren't really there to game).

Also, hotels don't allocate 100% room space to anything. How much the hotels give to block may be interesting or may not as it doesn't really matter if it's not going to change. There are out of block rooms. Someone I know posted that you could get a hotel room for $9,999 a night, so it was only like $52,000 for the con.

Much like how TD sells out at GC right away and lacks a reason to prevent that, that hotels sell out isn't a problem to the hotels or the con. May be good for the city that have limited number of attendees or limited number of people in downtown area or whatever. So, GC is a great success. That some people are out of luck is just a reality of the world.

I might find it liberating to break my consecutive attendance streak. Not like I do anything at GC anymore that is special.

Ian Lee wrote: It's more than 70,000. I don't remember the number, but I think it's more than 100,000 when include part-timers (and probably including vendors and others who aren't really there to game).

Gen con claims 71,000 people attended in 2024, and 70,000 in 2023 (this may not include vendors/staff - but then again it may as they might just be counting badges).