I know I’ll be back because my husband and I got professional badges for three years, so I can learn from this year’s experience and maybe get more done next year. Overall, though, I think we did pretty good for newbies.
First, there is no way to fully describe the sheer number of poeple there. It takes 10 minutes to walk by one booth sometimes. The lines for the bathrooms are always long. The food lines we were pretty lucky with and they had some good gluten-free food choices.
Second, my experience with the Hall H line was great. We did not wait overnight. We did not get wristbands. But we did get in line an hour or so before the doors opened and though we weren’t close to the stage, we got to sit in the big hall and see (from a distance) our favorite stars from The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Con Man, Supernatural and Sherlock. It was the most relaxing time we had there, because once we got seats we were sitting in cool air conditioning for hours. Hall H has it’s own food, water and bathrooms. Just us and 6500+ of our closest, geeky friends.
Finally, the worst was that the volunteers seemed to have no idea what they were doing, what others were doing or where we were supposed to line up. We tried to attend the costume contest show on Saturday evening and we got in line after asking about five people where the line was. Then someone came by and told us we needed tickets, which we didn’t have. We walked over to someone and they told us we didn’t need tickets. So we got back in line, after losing our place and were again told we needed tickets. This time we were told to go get tickets around the corner. Well, around the corner was a 30 minute walk around the entirety of Ballroom 20 until we finally found the front of the line and the volunteer there said we had needed to be in line early that morning to get tickets to the contest and then should have waited in line all day. Ugh. So we left.
It was like that a lot. Volunteers would say go over there, and when we got over there volunteers would say “go back over there.” That was frustrating. That and the lines to do activities in the Exhibition Hall, like The Walking Dead, were always capped. They would take anymore people. But the volunteers near the experience didn’t know that and after you spent 20 minutes walking to the line at the back of the hall they would tell you the line was capped. Have they never heard of walkie talkies?
I know they were tired and overworked and that they were volunteers. I was just disappointed that they didn’t have more information. If you’re going to direct over 170,000 people around a place at least know where you are sending them. Especially when it takes 10 times as long to walk somewhere in those crowds.
Also, we had professional badges and the volunteers would often tell us we had a special line that was “over there” but when we went “over there” no one had a single clue what we were talking about or where the professional line was.
Overall though, the shuttle system worked well. Uber didn’t disappoint as an alternate. The food in San Diego was excellent and the restaurants were much less busy than I thought they would be. Our hotel was very nice. We did a lot of walking on the waterfront and we got some cool Game of Thrones swag. We visited the Maritime Museum and walked on the Star of India and we spent an afternoon at the Midway Museum. We also celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary there.