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I'm not sure if this counts as 'rumor' or 'fact' since it is second hand. A good friend of mine is friends with a CCI executive. They were talking last weekend and the CCI executive stated that they had seriously considered holding WonderCon 2012 in San Jose, but didn't because there were issues with obtaining the necessary hotel rooms/space. That implies to me that CCI would seriously consider coming back to Northern CA for WonderCon 2013.
CCI posted this last night: "Please don't read anything into the email we sent out. We just wanted to remind people that if they wanted to attend WC they could get discounted badges online. Our plan is to be back in SF next year. They just haven't given us dates yet."
THE BEAT: Let’s get right to it: So what is happening with WonderCon? Where will it be next year?GLANZER: I don’t think there are dates in this facility [Anaheim] for next year. Our plan was always to find a place where we could have WonderCon-or not have WonderCon. We toyed with the idea of taking it off the calendar but in the end we thought, we should try to keep it going. After looking around, the place that had dates closest to ours, and had exhibit space and, most importantly, had enough meeting space and hotel rooms, was Anaheim. They were able to gives us some dates and so we picked Anaheim.But, I have to tell you, we could never just move an event down to experiment. If we were to do that we would just start an event-we wouldn’t have a Friday day. You don’t just come into a market and start as a three-day show. Fans aren’t ready to take a half-day off and so on. As it turned out, Friday was not bad, we were pretty surprised.We hope to be in Moscone for 2013, but we haven’t got dates yet. But to be fair to Moscone, they typically don’t give us dates more than six months out. The problem with that obviously this year when you have this big hole in the calendar. So we’re hoping they give us dates sooner than later.THE BEAT: I’ve heard the reason why Moscone won’t give dates is because there aren’t enough hotel rooms booked.GLANZER: Yes, it’s very common.THE BEAT: And understandable.GLANZER: If you have an organization that comes in and books a ton of hotel rooms, and then you have a convention that comes in and books a minimal amount of hotel rooms, the idea is those who are spending more on hotels are going to spend more money across the board, organizations that have expense accounts, doctors, pharmaceuticals, tech conventions.The issue with WonderCon is we sell out our room blocks and we’ll get another hotel, but SF has an abundance of mid range and low range hotels throughout the city and there’s no way to track that. So we keep telling them yes, we had nearly 50,000, people we sold out of room blocks but there’s no way to tell who is buying outside our hotel rooms.We had the same problems with San Diego for a long time, but the convention center actually took a gamble on us [both laugh] and said, you know, we SEE the people here, maybe they don’t stay in hotel rooms, and there weren’t a lot of hotel rooms downtown back in the day. But as it turned out, it was a boom.THE BEAT: I’m not going to ask you to go inside the head of SF officials, but is there not an argument to be made that this is a cultural event that adds some kind of merit to the area? It’s a tradition in the Bay Area!GLANZER: It is. You can lead that proverbial horse but you can’t make them do something. San Francisco is a great city so I don’t think they are lacking for conventions. And I can’t speak for them, but if they have something that obviously has an abundance of hotel rooms and money, and then something they are not really sure about, they will go with the thing they can quantify.That being said, the show has been around the Bay Area for 25 years. It gets a lot of press. I think one of the things that San Diego realized is that the heads in beds is very important, and maybe San Francisco doesn’t need this, but the news coverage is very important too. I don’t know if you’ve been following it, Anaheim is getting a lot of press out of this show. And when WonderCon is in SF gets a lot of press.We’ll see what happens. My real hope is that the show will have done well enough, that SF will say wow, we’d rather not lose that and give them dates farther out.THE BEAT: Would you consider coming back here? Another venue mentioned to me was San Jose.GLANZER: San Jose is a great facility. They have a hotel that’s attached to the facility. We’ve toured it. They have some meeting space. But it’s almost like Anaheim in a way, in that it’s in a market that is a subset of another market. One of the big problems with Anaheim it’s that not Los Angeles, it’s not SD, it’s in between. San Jose has the same thing.THE BEAT: People don’t plan their year around going to San Jose, Dionne Warwick aside.GLANZER: Can we get the audience there? I loved San Jose when we had APE there but they don’t have an over abundance of hotels. I understand they have expanded their hotel facilities. We’ll have to see dates, but I think everything is open, especially if Moscone doesn’t give us dates.THE BEAT: So it really is a complete question mark.GLANZER: It really is. Now, to be fair to SF, they don’t give us dates until six months out, but we’re trying to argue that is just not enough time. It’s almost a Catch 22. Do we start looking for someplace else knowing that they are going to give us dates? Or….I don’t know.THE BEAT: Gosh, won’t this ever be settled. You’ve had so many years with the big Comic-Con with endless questions. Now WonderCon is a hot potato!GLANZER: Yeah, we could certainly do with less of that. We would love to be back in San Francisco. That’s our plan, and it’s always been our plan. We’re just trying to get those dates.<snip>
I would you space out the dialogue in the interview. Running all those sentences together makes it difficult to read.