A few things. First, we announced a time in advance by the request of several of your fellow attendees. Prior to that, we'd always just announced whenever the link was ready. I do think it's more fair to announce a time everyone knows about, and that is indeed here to stay.
While we will be reviewing the time (mainly because I also work all day and subsequently lost a day, wich was my fault since I chose noon), the thought behind the earlier time was because I wanted to make sure I could reach people when issues popped up. Behind the scenes of that launch, our Exec Director, hotel staff, Passkey people and more were coordinating efforts to try and solve problems quickly. Whatever the time is in the future, it will have to be one that works for a lot of people trying to help resolve tech hiccups, etc in mere minutes.
There will never be enough rooms for people, and there will never be a way to fully satisfy everyone. I'm the staffer who noted there ended up being 3 days for people to book, because well...there were. But because this also was the first year we announced, there just wasn't a way to predict what would happen. The fast bookings surprised everyone, us included. After the con, we'll be looking at cancelations from here on out, to see if those are inflated. It's just hard to know yet. Our Exec Director did make early arrangements with the Hyatt so we could have that on hand, which is the earliest we've ever had or been able to announce an overflow hotel.
But for this being the first time for a lot of this, I am personally very happy we were able to grant requests from attendees. Like I said, the advance announcement evens the playing ground for everyone, and is here to stay.
