Regional Hotel Reservations - When?

[sanddrag]

The ambiguous and un-announced opening date for team hotel booking is concerning. That's not the right way to go about this. For Ventura, there are two hotels listed so far. One of them does not have a link yet, and the other one has a link to the hotel's own website, where you can only book up to 3 rooms at a time.

An e-mail to Experient about a particular hotel we were interested in resulted in a vague response to look on the website for our "district" and an 800 number to call. A call to the provided 800 number resulted in 10 minutes of hold time after speaking to someone who had no knowledge whatsoever of the event or hotels available. After they came back from the "brief hold" they told me that although they themselves were not able to access their website, that I should look at the website, and when that didn't answer my question, they asked if they could place me on another "brief hold" at which point I'd had enough and gave up. I'm not sure what "cut" or sum of money these people get to make handle this with teams on FIRST's behalf, but whatever it is, at least so far, FIRST is not getting their money's worth.

At the present time, I am not impressed with the handling of hotel arrangements for teams this year.

Am I just too early on all of this? Last year we darn near missed out because just about everything was booked solid by the time we were added into the event from the waitlist. Hence, my early preparations.

UPDATE: Experient did get back to me via e-mail, with a more coherent response to my question. They also indicated that this year booking is being handled with the hotels directly, rather than through the Experient website. It seems to me that the website this year is just a front-end to view what is available.