Hotels, Parking & Transportation
Basic Information
There are a number of main hotels that host Dragon Con, all situated in downtown Atlanta within walking distance of each other. Attendees staying at one of the main hotels, or even one of the overflow hotels within downtown, will have a relatively easy weekend of getting around. For attendees staying at one of the many hotels situated along the MARTA line, getting to and from the Convention will be easy, but be aware, the MARTA stops running at 1:00 am, and taxis can be expensive and hard to find outside of downtown.
If you are planning on driving in to the Convention every day, investigate parking options before you show up! There are a number of paid parking lots within a 6–8 block radius, and the prices vary. If you cannot find parking, consider finding a park and ride along the MARTA line and riding the MARTA into Peachtree Center Station.
Valet parking at the hotels is also an option, but the lines for the valet are long and it is expensive. (On the upside, your vehicle will be more secure!) For a general idea of where parking lots and garages are please see the map that follows this section.
MARTA, as mentioned above, is also a viable option for getting to and from the Convention! MARTA Fares are $2.50 per ride, unless you purchase multiple rides. Get a Breeze card and load it up for the number of round trips you’ll need and save a few dollars.
Train service hours for MARTA are:
Weekdays: 4:45 am–1:00 am
Weekends: 6:00 am–1:00 am
The train runs every 10–20 minutes.
It is also important to note that there is a MARTA station at the Mall at Peachtree Center, and all MARTA lines in Atlanta run through that station.
Parking Map
Stars indicate parking spots.
Main Convention Hotels
All of the main Convention hotels (marked by a star on the map on the next page) sell out for Dragon Con every year, as do many of the overflow and nearby hotels. As you can imagine, finding a hotel room can be challenging. To stay at one of the main Convention hotels, the first thing to do is find out when the hotel opens for Dragon Con bookings. Each of the hotels has a different date—some of them allow bookings a year in advance, some of them have dates spread throughout the fall. Dragon Con will usually post this information on their website as it becomes available. (Or ask at the concierge desk—they usually have the information for their hotel.)
The main Convention hotels will sell out the first day that rooms are available for booking, so it pays to be on your toes and ready to go that morning.
Once your hotel has been booked, what happens if you need to cancel? Things come up, unfortunately, and this can happen. If you need to cancel, call the hotel and talk to the reservations desk. Be aware, though, some of the hotels have cancelation fees. You might be tempted, if faced with a cancellation fee, to find someone else who needs a hotel room and try to swap out your name for theirs on the reservation. Unfortunately, due to rampant abuse of this system Dragon Con and the hotels had to put an end to hotel swapping. Hotel swaps will not be honored; don’t do them. If you want or need to reserve multiple rooms you can, just remember the name on the reservation is who will be responsible for the full cost.
It Costs How Much? Oh Myyyy …
Let’s face it, hotels are expensive. Other than (potentially) the cost of shopping in the Vendor’s Hall, it is the single greatest expense of the Convention for most people. Many people mitigate the cost by splitting rooms two, three, or four ways—okay, so I’ve actually heard of up to eight, and I’ve experienced up to six, but I really don’t recommend it, and the hotel won’t officially allow that many people to stay in one room anyway.
There are other considerations as well for how many people to jam into a room. When I started attending Dragon Con I worked for a band—I still do on occasion. One of the first years we attended we crammed the two band members and four salespeople (me included) into one hotel room. In previous years we had topped out at five people, and even that was tight. The sixth person, a girl we all knew, had decided that she wanted to cosplay a fairy for the weekend. In theory this was a great thing, we had all seen this cosplay before, and she was good at it—but the problem with this idea was that we had six people in a room intended for four, luggage stacked everywhere, plus band equipment, and there was nowhere to set her highly fragile, very expensive wings. What can I say, the wings got in the way. By the end of the weekend I was fairly certain that someone was going to get murdered in their sleep. (Thankfully no one was!). But that taught us all a very valuable lesson: If you want to stay friends with your friends, don’t overcrowd your hotel room.
Hotel Room Etiquette for Sharing Rooms
Some of this is fairly obvious, some of it bears repeating anyway. If you are sharing a room common courtesy is a must! When booking a hotel room with other people it pays to agree on the rules in advance. These are the rules that I follow; they have really helped over the years.
The Concierge Desk
That desk off to the side in the hotel lobby where there’s usually one or sometimes two people standing, smiling brightly, wearing blazers, and looking official—that’s the concierge desk. A concierge, according to Google: “is a hotel employee whose job is to assist guests by arranging tours, making theater and restaurant reservations, etc.” They are extremely helpful. In addition to the things listed above, they can also give directions, offer dining suggestions, provide maps of the immediate area, and answer general questions about what events are going on in town. Concierge services are provided for free—though you will of course have to pay for any tickets or reservations you have them make. All you have to do is ask. If they go out of their way to help you, it is polite to tip them.
Double-Check Everything
A month before Dragon Con, call the hotel and reconfirm your hotel room. The hotels are dealing with a lot of people. It’s much less stressful to find out there’s been a mistake and correct it a month in advance, than it is to be standing at the desk arguing with a check-in associate about why you don’t have a hotel room. By then they have none to give you.
A week before the Convention, confirm online on the hotel’s website. If you have trouble with that call them again just to make sure.
Credit Cards
While double-checking everything, make sure to call your credit card company. Let them know that you’ll be traveling and that your card may show charges from multiple states. The vendors at Dragon Con come in from all over the country and the purchase you make in Atlanta may look like it’s from L.A. It’s no fun to have your credit card suspended on Saturday because the credit card company thinks it’s been stolen.
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