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How quickly do hotels sell out at PAX?
Hi everyone, it's your favorite hotel-questions person here. I made a previous post about booking a hotel way ahead of time, but I've had numerous life things crop up that needed to be dealt with. I did have $250 set aside for a hotel for one night (two people), but I may end up using $100-$250 of it.
My question is, what are the chances that I get any hotel downtown using the PAX rate after the tickets go on sale? My husband and I are not picky about our hotel. Basically any hotel with the PAX rate will do for us. Do all hotels sell out when tickets go on sale, or is there a chance there will be a hotel or two with rooms available in mid June?
This could all mean nothing if the tickets come out post-May 15th (I get paid), and I could put the money back in our fund (I pray that this is the case). Thanks everyone!
My question is, what are the chances that I get any hotel downtown using the PAX rate after the tickets go on sale? My husband and I are not picky about our hotel. Basically any hotel with the PAX rate will do for us. Do all hotels sell out when tickets go on sale, or is there a chance there will be a hotel or two with rooms available in mid June?
This could all mean nothing if the tickets come out post-May 15th (I get paid), and I could put the money back in our fund (I pray that this is the case). Thanks everyone!
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Later on, there will be a room share thread for single stragglers and people looking to share their room to cut costs. I personally room shared the past few years.
You don't have to pay anything for the hotels up front and you can cancel with no penalty as long as you can cancel within a few days. So, like RavenHusky said, rooms will open up and shift around as it gets closer to the show.
The real battle is going to be using this god awful new system they implemented before East.
You're totally safe to make a booking when the hotels go live and not be charged until you get there. Also worth noting, plenty of PAXers (like myself) book whatever is available and camp out the reservations site for openings on hotels we really want. More often than not, we'll report back on the forums for folks still looking for rooms
What is the new system, and why is it so bad?
PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAXXXXXXXXXXX!
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They got rid of OnPeak (the system they've been using for years) and partnered with a new company to handle the hotel stuff. It's terrible. Just scroll through this PAX East thread to relive the nightmare.
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/222435/pax-east-2019-hotels-live/p1
But what was bad about it? Nobody in that thread elaborates, aside from the errors from the servers not being able to handle the influx, which is pretty much par for the course for any new system since nobody expects the PAX crowds. One would hope the company learned from that experience and has paid for more servers in advance of PAX West's order scheme.
I mean, "That was the worst hotel booking experience I've ever had... period. Let alone PAX. As soon as I hit 'sort by distance near>far' I regretted my entire life," doesn't explain what the problem was.
I only had luck while using the map, and only for a single hotel. Otherwise all hotels disappeared again. Not sure how I feel about that.
And I still can't book once I've found the hotel. It just disappears again.
I've tried to forget, but iirc:
You had to click on each individual hotel (separate page) to see what days are available.
A hotel would appear as "available" even if they only had 1 day available (even if it was Tuesday after PAX) and you wouldn't know that until you clicked on the hotel to go to a separate page.
Even if a hotel had no days, it would be listed along with everything else in your search.
You can't add days to a current reservation. You can call the hotel and try to get them to do it manually if you want. With OnPeak, you could grab what days you could at the time, then add days as they became available. As a result, people at East often had multiple (sometimes several) separate reservations just to cover the days they needed, then had to call the hotel directly to try to get them to combine them together.
The site did not handle the load at all. It would constantly kick you back to the beginning of the process if it got stuck at any point of the many different pages you had to progress through, thus many people lost rooms they thought they were in the process of claiming. Say what you will about OnPeak, but at least it worked.
Many people didn't get any sort of confirmation email. They had to call the hotel directly to make sure it went through properly.
The site looks and feels like it was designed around 2002. The formatting is terrible and often parts of the pages don't line up properly.
So...yeah. Get ready.
No, Unplugged. Adding to the "what's wrong with the new hotels site" since others had asked what made it so terrible during East release.
I would also add that the cutoff date wasn't particular clear so no one knew when reservations were expected to be transferred over to the hotels in the first place. Combined with the aforementioned lack of confirmation emails and some people's reservations getting lost in the system, as well as them still taking reservations I think until literally like the week of East, just created a lot of unnecessary stress and confusion for folks who just wanted to make sure that their reservation was ok.
Not being able to add days is the biggest issue for me, because there hasn't been a year with OnPeak where I wasn't able to piece together a Sheraton reservation by PAX time by adding a day here and there whenever they came available. Its just gonna make the process much more of a hassle.
You can then go into that and directly select the days on a given room type to make a reservation, as opposed to doing a date search. Doing it this way made it a lot less of a hassle when doing East, for me at least.
Thanks you! My booking went smoothly, no slowdown or hicups.
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
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It was. Hotel site went up about 20min before tickets.
it wasn't supposed to 8-)
This is the dumbest thing. Not to mention it was hidden behind a "see details" dropdown. So, they want you to only book "Fri-Mon" then email them a request to add dates? Sure, book a hotel with partial info and just hope you can actually show up Thursday and leave Tuesday? Perfect.
Seriously. Who comes in on Friday that isn't typically local enough to drive in?
I've done this process 20+ times for PAX now and the two times I've had to use Connections Housing, it has been the worst experience I've ever had with any kind of travel booking.
Basically not the Crowne, if you can manage it.
To add in on the Hotel site comments, I live near-by but not near enough to leave downtown daily and I booked Thurs-Tues. That made a lot of the hotels unavailable by default.
Yeah, that hill up to Crowne is rough. Then further to Renaissance is super rough. Especially at the end of a long day.
I was able to get Hyatt Regency. It was the only thing that let me do Wed-Tue. Only problem is that it's expensive as hell. Gonna keep looking for other options.
Yep. Although if you do end up going up the hill southwest, you should be able to cut through the smoking section at the top of the escalators in order to avoid a large chunk of the uphill walk(assuming you can survive the very unpleasant gauntlet of cig/vape smoke). I don't know if increased security measures will change that but for ESCC it was still an exit only path this year.
I also like that they removed the list function btw...
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
MH3U Monster Cheat Sheet / MH3U Veggie Elder Ticket Guide
I just picked up a Regency reg now too now that you got me thinking about that hill. Oof. Well, I'm still keeping an eye out for Sheraton.
I'm in a wheelchair, so I need closer hotels, but this is inconvenient for everyone.
It looks like they just added the View as List button back in there. You can actually see what days each hotel has now.
But I will say I didn't have the site crash or lock up on me, so that's a plus.
Luckily it looks like you can log into your existing reservation and add days from availability by clicking Change Dates:
Doing this will show available days as well as waitlisted options, so this seems like good news for folks that need to piece together a different hotel.
Same for me. At least their support staff are pretty good.