MattTheMinion

The reason you can't find rooms from Thurs-Sun is likely because our contracted room block is sold out on Thursday. You may have some luck calling the number on the passkey site instead of the hotel, since they may be able to add rooms to our block, or at the very least suggest an alternative that would work.

While I have watched one of their previous Big Experiments and was amused (I wasn't fast enough to get a ribbon), I'm not sure it would really fit our mission of promoting East Asian culture. Perhaps if he was willing to alter his 'experiment' somewhat? One thing to keep in mind when suggesting programing is that a big hurdle that will have to be met for it to be considered, is its relationship to the culture aspect of our mission statement.

From what I was sent by our hotel coordinator, it looks like all the rooms in the Days Inn on Fri, Sat, and Sun are spoken for. This is pretty much the only way to do it. We will likely put up the list of hotels and room rates again once the site rollover is done, but if you want the Otakon rate, you will have to go through the PassKey System. The problem we run into is with individual hotel contracts for room blocks. For the most part once it's signed, unless we have a specific clause in there saying 'wait till day X', the hotel is free to publicize the rooms and t

Just so you guys know we have added 'lowest rate' clauses in our contracts with the hotels. Essentially, this means that they have to give us the lowest rate they offer anyone else (including many travel sites or AAA). Of course some travel sites take a loss in selling rooms, selling it for less than what they paid but making the cost up in other user services. Still if you do see a lower rate for a room than our rate, please take a screencap and let us know. Of course if our room block is sold out, by all means check for things like AAA rates for rooms outside of our block.

It really is us doing large block reservations, at least the initial ones. If I remember correctly we have somewhere around 200 rooms blocked across 3 hotels. Nan was correct that this is to account for staff (mostly 4 to a room), contractors (typically 1 or 2 to a room via their specific contracts), guests and their managers/handlers (usually 1 to a room, but sometimes with their families), and on and up it goes. Of course once our numbers become more solid, we will release rooms we don't need to the pool (as we usually do every year).

I'll take a look at what's listed tomorrow night and see what I can find out. Although I'm fairly certain that what you are seeing is correct so far.

Typically it is sold when we have tables in the dealer's room at other conventions. The last time we had an online store it didn't really do that much business, perhaps it's time to try it again?

More hotels will be announced when the contracts are signed. I think we have several more that are waiting for a little ink. Also we're working on putting together a page on our website that will summarize the info and hopefully explain the interface a little. So much to do and so little time...

Regarding the rooming system. As for the passkey thing. The large blocks of rooms that are reserved are those we (Otakon Staff) have set aside for ourselves. We do this every year to make sure that we have enough rooms for our staff. After all if our staff are not there, there is no convention. Finally, more hotels will be added as soon as we have signed contracts with them. Unfortunately while we have contracts, not all of the hotels were in positions to sign them with us by the end of this year's convention. If you work with the hotels directly, you may not get the Otako

Actually, there was no Otakon staff organization of the various cosplay photo shoots. For the most part they have all be organized by members looking to put something together on their own. However, having some staff involvement is something we've talked about trying from year to year, but it has usually been set aside so that bigger concerns could be met first. Of course we also had our Photosuite up on the 300 level across the hall from the Otacafe, where people could have met up en masse and had their pictures taken under professional lighting and with backdrops.

Definitely wait until we announce the hotel rates. We've got something different in the works for the upcoming year and reserving a room early means that you likely won't get the Otakon rate.

Getting Bandai's or any other company's permission for recently as-aired shows might be a bit harder than you think. Unfortunately, it's never as simple as "if you can buy it, you can show it publicly". A lot of it will depend on regional licensing and distribution agreements that they have set up. For example if company A created and distributed a show in Japan, but sold the licensing & distribution rights to company B for the US, now you have to get company B's permission. Of course company B might not want to let you show a raw Japanese version of the show, and heck they may want to

Also just to add to Andrew's post, here are the basic directions to the theater from the BCC.

Indeed... Expect a FAQ shortly.

Well it's all a matter of intelligent budgeting, a little negotiation, and looking at specific markets. For example with a TV ad, it wouldn't make as much sense for us to advertise on the West coast as the East coast, so knowing this we can reducing the market area we would be paying to reach and thus reduce the cost. Likewise there are things like time slots and such we could work around if we so choose to stay within a budgeted amount.

Yes there are plans in the works for an update to the map, unfortunately they got sidelined by an unexpected priority. We should have a more up to date version posted in the coming weeks.

The form and announcement were made live earlier today because the real life jobs of the web guys would prevent them from accessing the system closer to noon, meaning that the forms wouldn't go live till after they got home from work. Because of this they felt that it would be better to make the forms available a little earlier than the opening time instead of 5-6 hours late. The masquerade staff have clarified that any submissions made before noon on June 25th will need to be resubmitted after the official opening time. Also I wanted to clarify something about the confirmation e-mail

The registration forms will be available when Masquerade registration opens. Since slots in the Masquerade are limited, it would just cause a lot of problems to open them earlier than announced.

As far as I know it is still ongoing; however, someone from the Programming or Exhibitions Section will be the one to confirm this. Regarding the website, we typically take down portions of it from year to year to give new department heads a chance to revise the contents of their pages as they change. Ultimately there are always unexpected bottlenecks in getting things posted, like reviews of forms and confirmations of rules and policies. My guess is that there will be something announced one way or another in the upcoming months.

The plans are to show portions of it before the convention, since it is for promotional purposes after all. Unfortunately I can't say where at this point, because I really don't know.

Yes it is true. You can read about our announcement at TAF regarding this here.

Not a bad idea, but I think that will depend more on who owns the TVs (BCC, Starbucks, etc...) and whether or not there is a simple (and inexpensive) way to drive a feed into all of them. I talk with our technical operations manager about this and see what his opinion is. My gut tells me that it's not very likely for this year, but one never knows.

Yeah, the planning area was just added to the members area of the Otakon website. It hasn't been announced yet, since we're still testing some aspects of it (as you may be able to tell by some of the scheduled events - aka Party Plaza). Plus we would like there to be a little more content in there before it goes live 100% or else we'll have excited people logging in to find a blank page. Anyhow when it's finally ready to go we think it will give members plenty of new features, some of which were pointed out already, like: - The ability to marking dealers and artists you would

Considering that it appears that all of the downtown hotels are pretty much sold out for our weekend... I'm not sure we're going to be the unlucky ones.

Actually the website said "127 out of 670 available Room Nights remaining." which came from the previous update we received from the hotel. A room night is one room open for a single night, and does not necessarily imply that the same room is open the next night. Unfortunately, hotels only give us information in room nights and not actual rooms. They do this mostly because they are more concerned with how full the hotel is each night, instead of for the entire weekend. As such, the 127 available room nights number they gave us could have been broken down to 40 rooms available on Thursday n