Help! Hotels for Champs

[nedwards28]

Hi teams,

We are desperate for help. Apparently, we don't know the system well enough to be able to do this properly. The Experient site is super frustrating and only seems to give us hotels that are out by the airport. I honestly don't understand how teams can book hotels for Worlds early.

Little background:
We surprisingly qualified last year and pulled travel together just a couple weeks before. The experient site couldn't even find hotels for us saying everything is booked. We ended up staying out at the airport and had a horrible experience with the commute on the metrolink. There were a couple times when our group was put in a significant amount of danger trying to travel home late after competition or roboProm. Not only that but, we were 1.5 hours away from the venue. We told ourselves that would never happen again. So, we have been calling hotels on our own since december hoping to just book something and nothing is available. We figured the experient site had them all booked so we waited. We have been told that you have to wait for a link to be sent to you to be able to book rooms. We thought rooms would open up as the weeks of play went by and teams cancelled rooms but, no, we can't find rooms. We are in experient now and it is putting us all the way out at the airport again! In fact, we are placed even farther away.

Is there a trick to this whole booking hotel rooms thing? We are frustrated to say the least and if it wasn't such a good experience for my students, I would consider just letting our spot go to another team if we qualify. We really feel like we are lost in this whole system.

What do you do to make sure you can get hotel rooms in St. Louis?

Thanks,
Naomi