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Comic-Con International — the organization that makes San Diego Comic-Con happen each and every year — knows that it’s not cheap to attend SDCC, and it’s worried that rising costs might drive fans into the arms of other, cheaper conventions.

For some years now, Comic-Con International has been staying away from long-term agreements to keep San Diego Comic-Con, which is one of the most well-known conventions in North America in addition to being one of the largest, actually in San Diego properly. As things currently stand as of a January 2025 agreement, the show will continue through summer 2027, but its future beyond that is unclear.

“Our contract does run out in '27 and one of the challenges, you've all heard us talking about this, is the number of hotel rooms, number of hotel room blocks, and number of hotel room rates,” Comic-Con International head of communications and strategy officer David Glanzer told fans during the Comic-Con Talkback panel at the end of SDCC 2025. “So that has been deteriorating. Some hotels have been giving us less room blocks [and] higher rates, and that's something you guys all are specifically affected by, [because] you can't get a hotel closer to the facility or it is prohibitively expensive.”

When we looked at the topic in the past, the average nightly rate for hotels during SDCC is around $375; obviously hotels closer to the San Diego Convention Center are far more expensive than that.

The conflict between CCI and hoteliers isn’t a new one; when the latest contract between the convention and the city was signed, Glanzer explicitly referenced the fact that hotel costs played a significant part in the negotiations.

“We are excited to stay in San Diego for the next few years, which is made possible, in large part, to the many hotels that offer competitive rates and meeting space,” he told local news station Fox 5. “It is vitally important to maintain affordable hotel rates for the tens of thousands who visit San Diego for Comic-Con each summer and while it came down to the wire, we are grateful for the additional hotels that came on board to allow for this agreement to be signed.”

Talking during the SDCC 2025 Talkback panel, Glanzer expressed that Comic-Con’s worry is that rising hotel rates will push fans away from SDCC as a whole. “There are now more conventions than there ever have been, and our big fear is we don't want you all to have to choose another convention because it's more affordable,” he said. “So we’re working on a whole bunch of different fronts.”

Will San Diego Comic-Con remain in San Diego past 2027? It’s apparently still up in the air, but perhaps more in the hands of forces outside of the actual show organizers than many might have thought.

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