Coronado's Most Read Newspaper & Community Website

How To Bring Comic-Con Money To Coronado

Every July the residents of Coronado look across San Diego Bay at over 100,000 people descending on the convention center for Comic-Con. They jam up downtown San Diego and create a hotel shortage as far away as Mission Valley. For 5 days they make traveling by trolley a miserable experience and make it impossible to find a cab. Yet here sits Coronado, a couple hundred yards away, completely untouched by all of it. They spend $163 million dollars during Comic-Con, but I don’t think they spend enough of it in Coronado. Here are some ideas and thoughts to bring some of that money across the bridge to Coronado, along with some questions to generate more ideas:

Basic idea: Pitch Coronado to the Comic-Con crowd as a place to stay and play.

Why Coronado is a better choice:

1. It’s just a single bus ride away OR a ferry ride away

a. What about a shuttle from downtown Coronado to the convention center during the con? A privately funded deal would be awesome. Same thing with the ferry.

2. It’s nicer than downtown & closer than Mission Valley

3. Great restaurants AND the beach

4. Water recreation

5. If you want to do stuff OTHER than Comic-Con while in SD, Coronado is a vacation within the vacation.

See about bringing the Hotels & restaurants of Coronado into partnerships with the Comic-Con crowd for special room rates, food discounts and package deals for other recreation stuff on Coronado.

What other packages & bundles would entice con people to come to Coronado? What are some cool perks Coronado could provide to a con person that are totally unique AND awesome for a con person? What would make a comic-con person go crazy that’s unique to Coronado? Maybe every hotel room includes a free bicycle rental and/or Wi-Fi for the duration of their stay.

Partner up with San Diego airport, Hotwire type site or individual airlines to get special (exclusive) airfare and shuttles for con people staying on Coronado.

Leaning on SDMTS to offer special, $15 five day transit passes for any San Diegan or Comic-Con person for the duration would be HUGE. Failing that, finding a way to subsidize con peoples transit passes would also be huge.

Make the comic-con people feel welcome with some sort of “Coronado for Comic-Con” atmosphere with some signage, maybe landing an after hour party or two, etc.

The convention is still 11 months away so there’s plenty of time to get the heavy-hitters of Comic-Con involved. The last 2 years I’ve gone as a member of the press, so please look at my photos from 2010 Comic-Con and photos from 2011 Comic-Con. All the people in those photos need a place to unwind, decompress and spend their money from 6 p.m. until 9 a.m. the following day, for 5 straight days. Pitch Coronado to them, and they will come. Cheers!

1 member likes this

Comment by Mayor Casey Tanaka on August 16, 2011 at 11:31pm: Those are interesting ideas to ponder. To some extent, it is up to our businesses and hotels to decide if they want to go to this level to cater to the Comic-Con crowd or not. Privately, I am relieved that the chaos of the Comic-Con experience stays on the other side of the bay, but in tough economic times, your ideas are worth the extra thought.

Comment by Rob Hurlbut on August 17, 2011 at 12:43am: Hello Mayor Tanaka,

I agree with everything you said. I think the real wildcard is the money-to-chaos ratio that will actually make its way over the bridge and across on the ferry. Coronado could fill a niche for people that want to unwind after a day at the con as opposed to keeping the party going. Besides, downtown already caters to the chaos crowd, leaving Coronado to grab up Comic-Con people that want to be able to leave the chaos behind at quitting time. Anyway, thank you for the comment, Mayor Tanaka.

Comment by Jonathan Burns on August 24, 2011 at 12:09am: Having attended Comic Con since 1999, I can tell you that the majority of Comic Con attendees are not interested in bike rides and beach galore. Their priority is to spend their money or their parents money on goods at the con or things around the convention center. Many will wait many long lines in Hall H (and likely miss some of their desired panels due to the overwhelming over packed lines.

The average comic con goer will want a comfortable, reliable, accessible place to sleep and chill at after a day of comic con. Their feet will be aching and they will have no energy for post activities.

I would focus on bringing some activities (similar to what is growing out to gaslamp) to Coronado like in the landing and tidelands (it would be a longshot.) I would make deals with the water taxi and ferry to focus on transporting guests to the convention and back. I would bring in a number of massage therapists and have your concierges focus on helping their guests with comic con related activities.

I don't expect comic con in it's current state to remain in San Diego. I think Coronado missed the boat on this opportunity about 5 years ago. The convention is too big for this town (San Diego should of continued to expand the convention center.) This was my last year attending as a guest, the organizers are overwhelmed with the swarm of attendees. It was impossible to buy a pass for next year this year (people were camping out in the middle of the night to get a ticket for the next day. Imagine 6,000 people waiting for 2000 tickets for next year each day.) Essentially, Comic con is really Movie con now. i miss it when it was a smaller con where there was oppurunties for a yougnster to meet his comic authoring hero, now it's chaotic.

There is another opportunity however that would do very well at the Hotel Del; A Steampunk Conference.

Comment by Rob Hurlbut on August 24, 2011 at 6:04am: Jonathan,

I agree with you about what the average Comic-Conner wants in a place to sleep and how the majority of them are going to spend their money. Let those people keep on enjoying themselves in Downtown.

This plan is for the OTHER people that you didn’t talk about in your comment. What if a mere five percent of attendees don’t want to party like a rock star during Comic-Con? What if only one in twenty people actually want to leave Comic-Con at the end of the day? That’s over five thousand people a day. What about all the exhibitors? There’s another thousand people. What about the celebrities? I don’t know how many hotel rooms are available on Coronado but I bet it’s less than six thousand.

See what I mean? That people that love Comic-Con are all set and this plan isn’t for them. But, I think Coronado can safely peel away a few thousand attendees each year simply because they aren’t in that crazy majority. I would never try to lure someone out of the Hall H line to see Coronado, but I WOULD try to lure exhibitors that have been dealing with Comic-Con crazies all day!

If you HAVE to come to Comic-Con but you don’t LOVE Comic-Con then Coronado might be for you!

Comment by Erin Grady Brown on August 26, 2011 at 7:27pm: I think the main draw of Coronado for Comic-Con is the ferry. That's what you'd need to push as a benefit, because parking and traffic downtown are absolutely atrocious during Con. Lots charge $20+ for a day and you still may have to walk a mile. A couple of years ago we parked at the Ferry Landing and took the ferry that goes directly to the convention center, and it was GREAT. We've been shocked at how few people know about, and take advantage, of it. Making a push on that, discounting tickets for people with Con passes staying in Coronado hotels, plus maybe adding some extra ferries those days, or day passes instead of just one-way or round-trip fares, could be a true benefit to Con-goers and to the local hotels.