If you are a disabled individual who needs mobility and/or accessibility hotel accomodations, please email [email protected]. We cannot promise or guarantee a room, but we will try to assist you the best we can.
As Vancoufur has grown, we have found that the method of “free-for-all” booking is no longer working for us. The sheer volume of sudden bookings causes our hotel partner’s sites to crash, hang, overbook, eat our rooms into holds, and generally cause them a lot of headaches and problems for everyone involved from all the frantic button mashing. It also means our hotel room block is not used effectively,and our hotel partners get mad at the convention. There is also increasing instances of fraud and botting occuring with free for all releases. This denies legitimate attendees a fair shot at hotel rooms.
We cannot continue to do this to our hotel partners if we want to have a con, and we want to be sure our attendees are the ones getting rooms, so this means we need to find a more orderly way of handling the hotel reservation process.
This year, we have decided to try a Tiered Hotel Release, and see how that works. There are many reasons we have decided to do this, and this page explains them as clearly as we can to be as transparent as possible with our decision making. We know that some people will not see this as fair, or disagree, but it was this or a hotel lotto, and we agreed that was way worse and no one wanted that. If we continued to do the old way, it may cause our hotel partners to not want to do business with us, which means NO ONE gets a con. And no one wants that either.
That being said, we are trying this for this year and seeing how it goes. If you have a complaint or issue, you can write the chair, at [email protected].
What is a Tiered Hotel Release?
A Tiered hotel release is a weighted priority system for attendees to book their hotel rooms. A booking link will be released to individuals within a group, who will be given a period of 7 days (1 week) to get their booking in. After this time, the booking link will be released to the next group and so forth until all registered attendees have had a chance to book. *
(* Note: Subject to availability)
How will the Tiered release work?
Our first priority is Volunteers, Dealers, and Accessiblity. Volunteers will be given their instructions through staff communications on discord and email. Vendors will recieve theirs via email from the hotel coordinator. Accessibility requests will be accomodated in the order they are recieved. DJ rooms will be held until selections are made. Buccaneer rooms are secured and are not a part of the Tiered booking. After that we will opening booking to Patrons, then Sponsors, Supporters, General Volunteers, then General Public.
If you require an accessibility accomodation for hotel you MUST send an email to [email protected] by October 1st. After this time, we cannot promise anything.
Attendee Release
If you are an Attendee, room booking will be offered in the following sequence:
1) Patrons –> 2) Sponsors –> 3) Supporters –> 4) General Attendees –> 5) General Public
We CANNOT promise there will be rooms for everyone, but we do have the largest block we’ve ever had over 3 hotels that are attached to the convention space via parkade or only steps away. We do have some capacity to negotiate after all the rooms in the block are reserved, but not until then. We also have two other near by hotels as overflow lined up. We also hope that by using the block more effectively more people will get the rooms they want for the dates they want.
In order to qualify for booking, an attendee MUST have both REGISTERED and PAID, completing the registration process. Registrations just sitting in a cart will not be considered for tiered booking.
Please note that we DO NOT HOLD registrations or items in carts. If you have a registration or item in your cart (for example, Buccaneer) It is not completed, and not held for you. Someone can and will snipe your spot if you don’t pay for it.
What is the current timelines for bookings?
- Patrons Booking will be Oct 8th to 14th
- Sponsors Booking Oct 15 to 21.
- Supporter Booking Oct 22 to 28th.
- Basic attendees book Nov 2nd-16 (subject to availablity)
- General public booking starting Nov 18th (subject to availability)
Why are you doing a Tiered Release this year?
In the last several years it has become evident that Vancoufur is getting too big to do the “free-for-all” registration style. The sheer volume of people frantically clicking to get a room has caused our hotel partners websites to crash, glitch, freeze, and otherwise become inaccessible to not just attendees but their regular customers as well distrupting business and making a headache for them. If we continue to make problems for our business and hotel partners, they will not want to do business with us anymore, and with a very limited number of hotel partners that can handle a con of our size in Vancouver, we simply cannot afford to continue to do something that causes them headaches. If they do not want to do business with us, the con happens for NO ONE.
We’ve also seen an uptick in scams and fraud targeted specifically at furry cons related to hotel and hotel bookings. Much like what is seen with ticketed events. There are only so many ways to combat this.
We determined we had to find another way to handle hotel booking, which was either a weighted tier release or a room lotto. We all collectively agreed a room lotto was right out and would suck way more than a tiered release. We decided to do a tiered release, weighted to give the people who contribute the most financially to making this con viable the first chance to book a room and work our way down the list.
Our hotel, as usual, will be reserved via booking link. That booking link will be sent in order to Patrons –> Sponsors –> Supporters –> General Attendees
After all fully registered attendees have had at least 1 week to book, the link will be released to the general public. To qualify as a fully registered attendee, you must have registered and paid for your registration.
Will you have rooms for everyone?
While we do have the largest block we’ve every had over all three hotels attached to the convention space, the number of rooms are finite. We cannot promise we will have rooms for everyone, however, we do hope that the majority of people who want one will get an opportunity to get one. We have also some opportunty to negotiate for more rooms if we fill the block we have. We also have several new options for very close overflows (just across the road, up a few blocks) we will open once the block is full.