Anime Boston

It is, as quote from what I am reading....

399.00 (USD) per night
Rate rules
Guest room, 1 King or 2 Double Room details
The rate for this room changes on 5/25/13 to 449.00 (USD) per night

This year, it was 189 per night. I would "figure" the price would be cheap right about now, but this is a drastic increase. Odds of this changing?.... Kind of sucks. Looks like my group will possibly be moving hotels this upcoming year. That moves from about a 650 dollar weekend to nearly 1500 on the hotel room alone. That is pretty bizarre...

Yea...I just did it using the AAA rate and I only got $20 less than that. That is the highest I have ever seen it. I guess you can wait a bit though like until fallish maybe? Sometimes they have the best rates in fall. I reserved my room for this past AB in November and the rates for all the hotels in the area were MUCH lower than that is right now.

If it's any consolation though, I just searched those dates on the Midtown's website and their rate is $209 which is the highest I've ever seen their hotel as well but still a lot cheaper than the Marriott...especially for parking. I have stayed at the Midtown before and they are a pretty nice little place...but they're a no frills type place. Don't expect the luxury of the Marriott.

You should really wait for the convention rate...

Is the convention rate going to be that big of a difference when the time comes?.... I mean, 189 was pretty great, and was better than the convention rate last year. Even with the price at 399, is the rate going to drop "that" much?... Of course, I don't expect it to be 189....200, but I am still guessing it would be atleast 300.

It's only that high for 1 of 2 reasons. (or both of them together)

1) By booking that far out, they know they have you by the balls and can charge whatever the hell they want. It's not a realistic price. Airlines do this all the time. It's the "you seem pretty desperate booking this far out" rate.
2) The con block was already contracted and was pretty big. Big enough that caused a spike in the demand calculation algorithms they use to automatically set prices. Think of it as a run on rooms.

Given the Hilton website claimed to be completely sold out of rooms for AB '13 last I checked, the hotels are probably in the middle of putting the contracted data in their systems. Some hotel chains make the individual hotels enter in that data on the same restricted time schedule as their customers have to. Corporate controls the websites.

We'll probably have to pay more than the low rates you're used to, but the prices you're seeing are more likely the direct result of the hotel sticking room block data in as part of their contract, and the corporate website adjusting to the sudden spike for demand a year out. It should, in theory, go down. Who knows, though, they might have been contracted to not let any person without the con rate code get a better deal than X all weekend. Either way, you shouldn't expect the con rates to be that high at all - especially when there are other alternatives at half the price.