Comic-Con May Leave San Diego Over Hotel Price Gouging, Say Organizers

San Diego Comic-Con is celebrating its 55^th anniversary July 24-28, but how much longer will the world’s oldest and largest pop culture festival remain in its namesake city? As hundreds of thousands of fans are getting ready to make their way to the annual celebration of all things geek, convention organizers are sounding a warning to the city’s hospitality industry that the current situation with hotel pricing is unsustainable and could impact the show’s plans when its lease with the San Diego Convention Center comes up in 2025.

“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.

“Many of the hotels downtown have been incredibly wonderful to us,” said Glanzer. “They’ve allowed us to use meeting space, they’ve given us huge room blocks, they’ve kept their rates very competitive. But it’s tough when those hotels offer a competitive rate and then a hotel that chooses not to be in the room block charges an exorbitant amount of money. That means the people who work with us end up losing out.”

Glanzer said this problem continues to get worse despite more hotels being built nearby. “It doesn’t have to do with supply. It has to do with allocated room blocks in those properties.”

Glanzer said he understands that some high-end exhibitors, Hollywood studios and professionals are willing to pay higher rates but said Comic-Con’s main focus is keeping the event relatively affordable for ordinary attendees. That critical mass of superfans who come to SDCC from around the world make the scale, effort and cost of the event worthwhile for exhibitors and drive the billions of valuable media impressions that the Con generates every year.

“If attendees opt not to come because they can’t afford to stay at a hotel here, they’ll go to another convention. 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.”

With its lease coming due and longtime SDCC Executive Director Fae Desmond stepping back from a full-time role with the organization after this year’s show, CCI is at a turning point. The current board and a new showrunner might be inclined to explore options elsewhere if that gives the event more chance to grow and accommodate the vast and growing audience for comics, entertainment, art, collectibles, games, movies and community that has made Comic-Con the center of the pop culture universe.

“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.”

Glanzer also pointed out that Comic-Con has been bottlenecked by the capacity of the San Diego Convention Center, and several ballot measures to fund an expansion have failed. “We are grateful the city allows us to have the activations outside that allow us to create a campus environment, and we want to stay here and make it work. But if our attendees end up finding it too challenging, it would be unfair for us not to consider potential other venues.”

For Comic-Con, which is often measured in the tone of its communications, the message organizers are sending two weeks ahead of its marquee event couldn’t be clearer.