Not much of a celebration

I do not say this very often, and even less frequently in public, but Jesus Bloody Christ. Trying to book a hotel room for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing yesterday was the most excruciating thing imaginable.

Their conference-management site was supposed to go live at 1200 EDT, at the same time as the toll-free phone number. The link didn’t work, and I got nothing but busy signal on the phone until 1207. While I was on hold (when I finally “got through”), I tried booking online. But the site threw an error right at the point I gave it my CC details.

And in that 20 seconds, all the rooms blocked out for the “GHC rate” disappeared.

When I finally got an Orchid (conference mis-management company) person at the other end of the line (at 1237), all he could do was shrug and say, yep—all gone. He sent me to a third-party aggregator, where the rate for my hotel was 2x what the conference rate was, and which did not tell me that they weren’t using my credit card details to hold the room (at $460/night), they were charging my credit card.

It wasn’t until I scrounged around for a phone number for this site—and waited on hold for more than an hour before I got a human—that I discovered that I’ve got nearly $3000 on my card, and it’s non-bloodyrefundable.

GHC is expected to have 20,000 attendees this year (up from 18,000 last year). Whyever on earth did they do such a rubbish job of managing accommodations for those attendees? Last year it was their conference registration site that crapped out. This year they sold out general registrations in 20 minutes, and hotels in about the same period. How the actual fuck could anyone be online trying to snag a GHC registration while also trying to ditto a hotel room? It’s madness.

I had such a good experience at GHC last year. But already I’m hating this one.