GenCon Housing

Just a short post, today, because I had a longer one on Monday, which sucked all the words right out of me.

Well, sorta. I have more words, but they need a bit of polish, still.

In the meantime, remember what I said about naming names a few weeks ago and how I need to be better at giving credit where it's due?

This post is all about thanking Carol for making sure Stephanie and I have a room at GenCon, because we don't stay in the same hotel (and rooms) as the rest of the team does.

It means that (among other things), Steph and I aren't subject to the whims of traffic - we just walk to the convention center.  This, in turn, guarantees that there is a presence in the booth when it opens. It also allows us to stay in the convention center much later than the rest of the team, playing (and teaching) games in the open game areas.

In the past, Asmodee has just forwarded us their housing code and asked us to make our own reservations, for which we are partially reimbursed.  This year, they took care of making all of the arrangements, and I suspect Steph and I will be reimbursing them. But we'll see.

Either way, housing for the general public opened a few weeks ago - and sold out in a few hours, amidst a number of widely-reported issues with the interface. I started to stress at that point, not remembering that there was a separate pool of housing for exhibitors.

When vendor housing was scheduled to go live, they actually delayed it by two weeks to work out the issues they'd had with public housing.  So I had two extra weeks in which to stress.

Then, on Friday, Carol e-mailed me, asking which hotel we'd prefer. Now, last year, we'd had a scare whereby Steph and I hadn't initially been able to get the Convention rate for two of the nights we needed to be there. Asmodee stepped up and reserved rooms outside of the convention block for us, just in case.  It didn't end up being necessary - enough spaces opened up in the waitlist that we were able to get our stay as-needed, and Asmodee was able to cancel their reservation without penalty.

So I initially figured Carol's e-mail was a backup thing. In case Steph and I were short days again.  But no - she took care of making our reservation for us this morning.  And it's a good thing, too, because exhibitor housing filled up as quickly as the general public's housing did.

Now, I don't think Carol isn't the only person there doing administrative work like this - but she's the one who keeps me in the loop about it. So thank you, Carol. And please pass the thanks on to anyone else who deserves it - Ruby, Claire, Christophe, Stefan, Jules, and anyone else whose name I've missed, because I know I've missed a few because of how terrible I am with names (I can see their faces - I just can't remember their names).

And I'll see you in just over five months!