Epilog
From having a reservation confirmed at a great double suite room at the Embassy Suites to... no room at all by the time I got home.
*nods* Just so. That is the expurgated version of a very long day for me.
There is more - a postscript, which I will refrain from posting. The upshot of which is that I will be at Gencon this year.
Moral of the story:
Mistakes happen. No system is impervious to simple human error. How one deals with those mistakes, on the other hand, is a very different matter. The former is caused by negligence and without intent, while the other is a path picked out and embarked upon by deliberate choice.
Unintentional mistakes may be forgiven; errors in judgment in how you try to fix those mistakes, however, get no discount. For those you are judged at full retail.
What Gencon ought to have done is simple: they should have stopped the early registrations when they came to their attention and stopped taking more of them. Full stop. That's the sum total of what they ought to have done.
Where they crossed the line was in interfering with and purporting to nullify contracts which had already been formed by customers and hotels - contracts to which they were not a party and by their own disclaimers, acted only as agents to facilitate.
You can't have it both ways. You are an agent - or a principal. You are not both. A party may not slip on the coat of a mere agent when it gets cold and then cast it off when they find it gets uncomfortably warm.
