kevin_standlee | Feb. 13th, 2009

We officially opened up hotel booking for the 2009 World Fantasy Convention late yesterday. The pages were there for a few days, but we were doing some cleanup and testing, with staff members making reservations and several of us fiddling around with the Hotel & Travel pages on the WFC web site. Apparently, we didn't test quite enough, because shortly after booking opened, John Picacio pointed out to us that certain ranges of dates showed no rooms available. Upon a little further experimentation, I found that it appears to be October 28 that thinks there are no rooms, which isn't true -- we have plenty of rooms. We've informed our hotel liaison about it and she'll be working with the booking agency to clear up the bug. However, it might take a few days to get it fixed, what with a long holiday weekend ahead.

There's little danger of running out of hotel rooms, because the Fairmont has more rooms than the convention has members, and we've been reassured that if we were to fill our initial block of rooms it should not be difficult to get more. But as the note I put on the hotel information page says, if you want to book right now, call the hotel directly at the number shown on the booking page and you can make the reservation that way (this is why we know the rooms are really available), but then e-mail the hotel liaison to say you've done so.

My participation in this is to update the WFC web site pages quickly. If you happened to be looking at the WFC web pages late yesterday afternoon, you would have seen the site pages changing every few minutes while I worked to rearrange things in what I hope is a logical manner.

When the booking site bug is squashed, we'll start making announcements in other places.

Update, 1455: Updated the nature of the error after some more experimenting with individual nights and isolating the problem.