Comic-Con Could Leave San Diego Due to Hotel Price Inflation, Organizers Say

San Diego Comic-Con Celebrates 55 Years^th The world’s oldest and largest pop culture festival will be held 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 prepare to descend on the annual celebration of all things geek, convention organizers are issuing a warning to the city’s hospitality industry: The current state of hotel rates is unsustainable and could impact the show’s plans when its lease with the San Diego Convention Center expires in 2025.

“We would never do it to want “We’ve decided to leave, but if we were to end it and it became untenable for us, that’s something we would certainly have to look at,” David Glanzer, director of communications and strategy for Comic-Con International, the nonprofit that organizes SDCC and WonderCon, said in a phone interview Monday. “As event organizers, we’re always getting approached by different cities and it would be foolhardy for us not to at least consider that.”

Asked when the San Diego event will be in 2025, Glanzer said, “2025 is when our contract expires, unless something happens before this year’s convention. And if that’s the case, I imagine we’ll make an announcement at the event.”

The sticking point for the convention is the behavior of some area hotels. For decades, SDCC has negotiated bundled rates for rooms it offers to attendees, exhibitors, trade professionals and out-of-town guests at discounted rates. Typically, the most luxurious hotels within walking distance of the convention center cost $275 to $335 a night, and hotels further out can be booked for as little as $215 on the convention hotel website for registered attendees. Competition for rooms at the most sought-after hotels has become so intense that the day reservations open is known as “Hotelocapylse.”

Lately, Glanzer said, some hotels have been releasing fewer and fewer rooms in the blocks, knowing they can charge a premium on the open market. Unbooked rooms during Comic-Con weekend at some of the larger hotels can be charged two or three times the normal peak-season rate, and even smaller hotels and Airbnbs in the area are charging significantly more to take advantage of peak demand. This opportunistic behavior is now threatening to kill the goose that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars to the city in a single week.

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

According to Glanzer, this problem continues to worsen despite the construction of new hotels nearby. “It has nothing to do with the supply, but with the blocks of rooms allocated in these establishments.”

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

“If attendees decide not to come because they can’t afford to stay in a hotel here, they’ll go to another show. And if that happens, the studios won’t be able to have as big an impact and it becomes a downward spiral that no one wants to get into. If we can’t accommodate people who want to come to the show, we’re in a pretty tough spot.”

With its lease coming to an end and longtime SDCC executive director Fae Desmond stepping down from her full-time role with the organization after this year’s event, the ICC finds itself at a crossroads. The current board and a new showrunner may be willing to explore other options if it gives the event a better chance of growing and embracing the vast and growing audience of comics, entertainment, art, collectibles, gaming, film, and community that has made Comic-Con the center of the pop culture universe.

“I think people think that because we opened the Comic-Con museum here (in San Diego) and we’ve always had the show here, that we’re anchored in San Diego and can never leave. Well, we don’t want to leave, but we’ve had conventions in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Jose, and they’ve been very successful. I think a lot of cities would want to host us. In my experience with other sci-fi conventions that I’ve been to, cities were bidding to host the convention.”

Glanzer also noted that Comic-Con has been hampered by the capacity of the San Diego Convention Center, and that several funding efforts for its expansion have failed. “We’re grateful that the city allows us to have outdoor activities 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 difficult, it would be unfair of us not to consider other potential venues.”

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