There appear to be rooms available downtown Wed night, but no other night. I'm trying to take one of those Wed night rooms, but the system won't let me saying it takes a min of 4 nights stay. This makes no sense. If they don't have that many days available, they shouldn't be requiring it.
Where are you seeing room available on Wednesday on the Housing Portal?
One of the requirements for GenCon housing is staying Saturday night. This is why it is requiring 4 nights.
Requests for hotels in the downtown area must consist of three or more consecutive dates and must include the night of Saturday August 3, 2019.
The limited supply of downtown hotels go to those who are attending and staying at a downtown location for 3+ days consecutively. In the event that a Thursday - Saturday room becomes available for a Gen Con attendee, they can now tack on that Wednesday. Otherwise, I'm sure the hotel will book that room out of block if they can.
Try contacting the hotel directly for an out-of-block booking.
Yes - this is annoying.
Gen Con / the hotels tries to ensure people coming in for just 1 day don't chop up hotel availability and prevent multi night stays. This is good.
But not being able to book Wednesday night rooms at this point is just silly.
Sorry this is happening to you.
In my experience - the hotels have plenty of room on Wednesday night - although to pre-book they are currently charging an arm and a leg. I might try a last minute downtown booking with Priceline or hoteltonight.com on day of.
If that fails, there is always plenty of space in the outlying hotels.
I'm seeing this too. As it stands, the Hotel & Room page is a non-starter. Every hotel I've looked at is showing available for Wednesday night, then unavailable Thursday through Saturday (Aug 1-3). When I try clicking Wednesday, the icon for that day turns green (as it should), but when I click the "Select" button, I just get a pop-up saying, "There is a minimum night stay of 4 nights... Please search again." Since every hotel is displaying this behavior, it is currently impossible to book a room using this page. I called the hotel directly, and they do have availability, so the non-availability info displayed is just plain wrong.
Looks like the only work-around is to go around the defective GenCon Hotel & Rooms functionality and just book my own room. True?
The favor of a rapid response is requested, so I can get my hotel booking done before availability dwindles.
I just jumped over to the Housing Portal and it is working fine. It defaults to showing all hotels - even those without rooms available - so that may be causing you confusion. You need to change it so that it shows only hotels with availability matching your checkin/checkout dates and guest count.
On the Desktop version of the Housing Portal, click the checkbox labeled "Available rooms only" - just to the right of the "Price Range" slider. On the mobile version, you click the link "See Available Only" under the "Select Hotel" heading.
As of 10:24PM CST 3/4/2019, there are 4 hotels with availability checking in Wed, checking out Monday, 1 room, 2 guests:
Hotels will be available for months. In the past 5 years, I don't think I've ever seen the Housing Portal without available hotels until (maybe) July...and even then, I can't confidently say that there were none. This includes sell-out year 2017 (Gen Con 50).
If you want a downtown hotel, you'll have to go outside of the Housing Portal - by booking direct with the hotel at non-Gen Con rates - or you'll have to keep coming back into the Housing Portal daily checking, watching the forums, etc. Some downtown rooms usually open back up after Event Registration when some attendees cancel their registrations because they weren't able to get into a make-or-break event and then occasionally throughout the summer as people's plans change. It takes work, but there are a fair number of success stories of people who make it happen.
Good luck. Hope this helped you to at least see what is available.
Thanks for your response. We'll have to agree to disagree about the Housing Portal. I did put in the dates of my four-night stay and click Search, and every result I clicked on had availability for Wednesday only, and wouldn't accept bookings if you did select Wednesday. I didn't see any other controls or check-boxes to further refine results to show only hotels with rooms for all four nights. I'd suggest that, if four-night reservations are no longer available through the Housing Portal, GenCon might want to note that somewhere; it's just a source of frustration and a waste of time as things stand.
I went through Google Maps and found a room at Comfort Inn South, about 15 min / 5.5 miles from the convention center, and booked it directly on the hotel's site. Thanks again!
Ya, getting housing isn't an issue at this point. It was just I would have liked to of stayed down town for that one night that it appears has available rooms. I'm not going to pay extra for out of block registration.
Just a mild annoyance that seems like it would be to everyone's benefit if they fixed.
Last year I was able to book a room downtown through 3rd party apps (like booking.com) on Tuesday and wednesday nights for pretty cheap. I did it last minute though (that monday). So if you're into waiting that long you could book a diff hotel with no cancellation for that night and book one downtown that week. Then cancel the previous hotel if you're able to find anything. The price I paid was right around $120 at the hyatt.