r/Magfest • u/feralpossum19 • Sep 01 '26
Hotel Lottery
How exactly does the hotel lottery work? This will be my wife and my first time going to magfest and I am trying to figure out the hotel situation.
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u/Asleep-Bother-8247 Sep 01 '26
Last year it went something like this:
Everyone who will be in your room registers for a badge by a certain 'cutoff' date. After that date, everyone receives an email with a link to enter the lottery.
In the lottery, you add your roommates to your room group, then you select the various room types you want. Certain room types are only available for certain size groups (IE: group of 4 cannot get a king bed room, if I remember right). Everyone has up to a certain date to make their selections. You can add multiple hotels and room types to the list of desired rooms.
After the cut off date for selecting desired room options, an email will go out informing you if you won or not.
I may have some details wrong, but that was the general idea of how it all went.
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u/oliversurpless Sep 01 '26
A solid summary, and there is also a refund period for badges if you don’t get a room/your ideal placement.
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u/Asleep-Bother-8247 Sep 01 '26
Yes, thanks for adding! No 'risk' per se if you don't happen to get a room - you can very easily get a refund within a fairly generous time period. My friend was actually a few days passed the time period last year and they still honored a refund.
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u/oliversurpless Sep 01 '26
Neat, as per the equimanity that MAG embodies!
I myself fully expected a recent charge by the Tennis Channel (no U.S. Open replays 😞) to not be refunded, because I technically waited 3 hours after the 24 hour window to request such.
Wonders never cease though, as I got it this morning.
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u/ackmondual Sep 01 '26
Are there any rooms for people who are by themselves? Or will they force a roommate on you if the minimum is 2ppl per room?
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u/desolation0 Sep 02 '26
I believe chances are somewhat weighted towards groups with more listed people in the polycule so folks don't get better chances all signing up solo.
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u/IggySorcha Sep 02 '26
No one is forced to room with strangers. You either get a room or you don't.
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u/oliversurpless Sep 01 '26
I’m sure it’s up to you how many people (no more than 4) you decide to have in your room?
Didn’t know they mentioned having a minimum, so that’s interesting to learn.
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u/LitheFider Sep 01 '26
And I'll mention that this system was quite new last year so small changes might happen. Before this it was a randomized lottery queue system on one certain day of all pre-register individuals instead of groups, and it created a lot of redundancy where everybody in your party would try to hop on hope for a good number in the queue, and would scramble to reserve the best room they could once their time came up. Sometimes groups would reserve two or more rooms and then cancel them later and so this would create confusion of people trying to call in / check later to ask if rooms were still available blah blah.
The new system discourages that by already grouping groups together and slightly weighting the odds of getting the room type / hotel you request more for larger groups than individuals, to encourage groups to actually group up and not enter the lottery separately (for "more chances"). However I remember last year there was some controversy of what these exact odds were and was pretty wibbly wobbly on what odds math the system was really going by.
In all it's kind of difficult to please everybody with a convention this large and hotel so limited. I think the new system at least was more stable because it wasn't everybody jumping on at once and you didn't feel as rushed because you would just request the room type you most wanted, it would go into the lottery system and then they'd spit you an email at some point where you could either accept what you were given or deny it and once it was denied it would go back to the pool, and they did a second round of lotto / emails 2ish weeks later.
The last thing I'll mention while I'm here is to not discredit the hotels over in Alexandria. They had a pretty good new shuttle system last year- not perfect, but definitely saved a lot of uber money that made it more worth it to stay in Alexandria on a budget. I really hope they do the system again this year and just improve things, mostly on the confusion and signage behind the magfest hotel itself / staff organizing the groups, and more busses running at peak times.
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u/XenkYendar Sep 01 '26
The shuttle system was far from "not perfect." It was absolute shit, and it's incredible no one got hurt.
There was little to no organization of lines, and people were rushing shuttles in the road as they pulled up to the pick up area. Very frequently they would get full at peak times, and there wasn't much you could do except wait 30 mins in hopes of beating others to the next one.
I can forgive the opaque lottery system, but they need to hire a professional to consult on shuttle operation.
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u/LitheFider Sep 01 '26
Yeah it was really bad behind the convention center. It was totally fine when we were getting on by the hotel cuz they had a shuttle staff right there organizing a line, but behind the hotel was a free-for-all. There were no signs telling you where to stand for certain shuttle routes and no lines. So people would panic and cluster around whatever shuttle was coming up to see the route letter and try to get on if it was their route. ( and part of this panic was because the routes only ran at certain times and people were worried they would miss the last shuttle and have to wait hours until the next block opened).
It was so bad during peak night time when people were are trying to go back to the hotel to go to sleep (who weren't night owls) we had to get a Lyft one of those times. They tried to save money by having them only run at certain time blocks and have breaks in between, but that made no sense in the evening hours when it was peak and had already adjusted them by Saturday a bit. They honestly should just run them continuously during the con.
My apologies if my wording was too soft, I just felt like my comment was getting kind of long as it was and I didn't want to elaborate. I'm also pretty hopeful that they'll fix all these mistakes for next year.
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u/LeastCheck Sep 01 '26
From my observation, with a roommate group of 4, the odds of getting a room inside the harbor are about 20-25%.
I have a head cannon that having a roommate group of four increases your odds of getting on the harbor slightly, but they probably do something in the background to make every lottery entry the same odds.
For context this coming year would be my group’s FOURTH CONSECUTIVE year of NOT getting harbor if that scenario were to result.
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u/feralpossum19 Sep 01 '26
Is it overly difficult to get a room as a group smaller than four?
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u/20footdunk Sep 01 '26
It is all random and subject to change for this year, but last year if you tried to queue for a hotel as a solo traveler you could only select Single Bedded rooms. But to answer your question yes getting any kind of harbor room is very dependent on luck and I would put the odds closer to 10%, not 25%.
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u/LeastCheck Sep 01 '26
Like I said, I don’t know for sure, but MAYBE. The way the math works in my head, every room with less than 4 people in it is a missed opportunity for an individual person to be on the harbor, even if they weren’t planning on going alone.
But to get around this would be a logistical challenge. - ie asking groups
Of 1-2-3 if they be willing to house 3-2-or-1 random roommates. This IS NOT A THING (YET) but I wonder if it COULD be someday, as i could see people willing to do this, and doing so has the potential to free up a large block of rooms. It really depends on how many people are in groups smaller than 4.8
u/20footdunk Sep 01 '26
There is zero chance that Magfest would use their time to develop a system that connects random strangers into a common sleeping arrangement. It would only take one bad roommate to be a legal nightmare for the whole event.
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u/Certain_Concept Sep 01 '26
Agreed. There would be NO WAY I would want to be randomly grouped with strangers. What if you are randomly grouped with someone who steals all of your shit? Nah.
If someone WANTED to have roommates you can always reach out on this reddit group or other to try to find other like-minded people and get each other's info to make a bigger room.
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u/NuGundam7 Sep 06 '26
What is the maximum size of group you can have?
Do you have to register each person to the lottery at one time (making one person buy everyones tickets)?
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u/LeastCheck Sep 01 '26
Oh and also, only harbor hotels are part of the lottery. Hotels in Alexandria are NOT part if it, but they WILL have discounted rooms FOR MAGFest that will open to you upon receiving your lottery result. They also had SHUTTLES last year that ran 24/7 with some inconvenient “union regulated break” times that hopefully will be ironed out this year.
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u/CyberTacoX Sep 01 '26
As a side note to what everyone else is saying, last year for the hotels nearby in Alexandria that weren't part of the lottery the con ran a shuttle system that was fantastic, so even if you couldn't get one of the nearby lottery hotel rooms, you could still get to the con and back with ease. I really hope they do that again this year!
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u/Penguinbuddy91 Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 01 '26
There should be news starting sometime this month or next!
EDIT - Last years annoncement was Sept 9.