I just got through GenCon hotel reservations. What a shitty system that is! I get the hotel rooms for a group of 7 people. We prefer to get the 3-bed suites, which are a bit more economical and we thus only need 2 total rooms. There are about 3 hotels that offer those kind of rooms, and they do go fast.
So there I am, logged into the site on two different computers, once as me and once as my wife. As they only let you reserve one room at a time, my hope is to reserve two rooms very rapidly with two different accounts so we have a better chance at getting the rooms we want, or at least rooms in the same hotel. Both computers get a “you’re in line” message. OK, waiting…
One gets in. I select the room I want: 3-bed suite at the Hilton. I enter guest names and email addresses. Why is it required to enter a separate email for each guest? What a pain. I get that all in. I enter the CC #, and the room is booked. By now the second computer has made it in. I select another 3-bed suite at the Hilton. I enter more guest names and email addresses (as a cheat, I’m just copy/pasting my own email address 3 times). I get to the CC entry point, and I get an error: the room you selected is no longer available. WTF? It went away while I was entering freaking guest info?!
I go back, the Hilton is gone as a choice entirely. I select the Comfort Suites instead, which I’ve never heard of, but seems to have 3-bed suites. This time I successfully reserve a room. I go back to computer #1 and see if I can somehow switch my reservation to this other hotel. I find the hotel still has another room available. Screw it, I book it, now we have 3 rooms. Two at least are in the same hotel. I figure eventually when the dust settles I’ll cancel one.
OK, lest I just complain without offering a solution, here’s how to do it right Housing Bureau:
You know this is coming months in advance. So do many of the people attending. Let us log into a site and enter exactly which hotel rooms we want. Allow us to enter multiple rooms per account, and enter all the guest info at our leisure. Maybe even the CC info if we’re comfortable with that. Let us create a prioritized list: 1st choice: 2 3-bed suites at the Hilton, 2nd choice: 2 3-bed suites at Embassy Suites, etc. Then, on the day the thing officially opens, just hold an automated lotto and send us out emails about which rooms we got.
OK, you don’t like the site holding onto your CC # that long? You can still do all of the above, and then just make us log in and enter that last piece of crucial info on the date registration opens. Sure, we still have to queue up, but at least it’s quick and immediate about which rooms we get.
Hey GenCon, here’s a hint: do event registration the same way.
Will this get me better rooms or into more events I like? Probably not. Will it prevent me from having an extremely stressful experience at your website? Definitely.
Yeah, that system would be way better. Ugggh. Stupid housing!
And here’s the terrible, terrible update: turns out the last room I booked at Comfort Suites is actually 1 king and a sofa bed instead of 2 doubles and a sofa bed. Looks like the 3-bed rooms all booked up and I didn’t notice and clicked on the wrong thing. So now we have one room too many but getting rid of any one will not solve our problems. What a freaking nightmare.
That s*cks… feel bad for you, hope you’ll be able to fix everything!
Personnaly it wasn’t that bad, got a 2 beds suite at the Hilton, was hoping to get one at the Embassy but I knew it was long shot.
I was at the Comfort Suites last year by myself, no complaints about the room itself, but the breakfast buffet was so-so (heard their oven was broken) and the 10 minutes walk to the Con was kinda of dark during the night, with an old factory nearby, etc…
The length of the walk from the Comfort Suites won’t bother me – it’s barely farther away than the Hilton was, but the fact that it’s a DIFFERENT walk will throw me! I JUST finally learned the walk from the Hilton – only took me like 5 years! ;P
Also, if guys would just learn to share a damn bed, the 2 suites we have will be FINE. Penises should not prevent bed sharing!!
Willing to give an exemplary reference any time these people come to their senses and contract you to write a proper scheduling system.