Greetings!
We had hoped to announce the Big Bad Con 2016 dates this month, but once again we have hotel woes. This year’s conundrum is the most intractable yet!
As part of the renovations completed last year, all (yes, ALL) of the beds in the guest rooms are now permanently fixed to the floor. Short of unbolting the beds ourselves (and no, we can’t, we asked), there is no way to comfortably or reasonably fit a table in the private rooms.
So our timeline has been delayed as we’ve been debating between three difficult choices:
- Continue Big Bad Con at the Oakland Hilton without private rooms. (A very unappealing option, especially considering we had wanted to increase the number available this year.)
- Look for another venue that will house us. (We cast a wide net last year and came up empty, so we can cross a lot of hotels off the list already.)
- Cancel the con. (The saddest and least favorite option.)
As you can probably tell from the name of the post, we’re going with option #2. We’ve set a deadline of March 31st to find a hotel to host us. If we can’t find a new home for 2016, Big Bad Con will be postponed for the year.
Since we have to look further afield, we’re inquiring with hotels as far north as Richmond, as far east as Walnut Creek/San Ramon, and as far south as Fremont. We need 7,500 square feet and 20 guest rooms (with tables that can be removed, of course), and nightly rates that are below $130.
Should you know of any hotels that could hold us, please comment below or email thewolf at bigbadcon dot com. If we haven’t already contacted that hotel, we will!
We’re excited to see where our new home will be, now that Big Bad Con is moving out of Grandma’s house!
Best wishes for finding something, I know how hard you worked on it last year. BBC is my favorite of all the cons, so I’d sacrifice to get there, even if it was a transitional-from-ideal year. 🙂
That’s unfortunate – Have you checked with the Concord Hilton? They’ve got 20k of space, their nightly is 169/night base, a group rate might hit the range you’re looking for. And they’re within walking distance of black diamond games?
Their rate is a little too high for us but I’m checking anyway to see if they can bring it down as a group rate. The location and space are both viable if not ideal (most of their meeting room spaces are too large for us so we’d have to divide with pipe and drape).
Well, here’s hoping you can negotiate an option – celesticon has been canceled at this point, and that would leave a quite dry season.
I know a lot of GMs who haven’t got the means to do both cons are holding out hope that you guys can make it happen this year.
Damn, that’s a bummer.
I have an awesome set of work tools…I can get them out.
[…] off, many thanks for all your support. I got a flood of emails, tweets, and personal calls from folks who wanted to help us find a new […]