Gallifrey One 2024

At long last, Gallifrey One is thrilled to announce our first confirmed guest block for our next convention, Gallifrey One’s Miracle on 34th Street in February 2024.  We appreciate everyone’s patience while we dealt with a variety of factors (including the ongoing actors’ strike) and put off our guest announcements to the fall instead of the summer as usual.  But, this is just the beginning… we’ll have many additional guests to announce in the weeks and months to come. 

(As always, all guest appearances are subject to professional commitments.)

Alex Kingston

Alex Kingston is best known to Doctor Who fans as Professor River Song, the Doctor’s wife and an archaeologist and adventurer created by Steven Moffat, appearing in fifteen episodes of the series opposite David Tennant, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi from 2008 to 2015.  Kingston is also well known for her role as Dr. Elizabeth Corday on ER, as well as for playing Dinah Lance on Arrow and Sarah Bishop on A Discovery of Witches.  Her title role in the ITV miniseries The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders earned her a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress.  Other roles in film and TV include Grange Hill, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Infiltrator, Carrington, The Knock, Croupier, Sweet Land, Essex Boys, Without a Trace, The Widow and Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.  She has reprised the role of River Song in many of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas, including starring in their long-running “The Diary of River Song” that has run for 12 series to date.  We are thrilled to finally welcome Alex to her first Gallifrey One convention; she appears courtesy Showmasters Events and joins us on Saturday and Sunday.

Lalla Ward

Lalla Ward first appeared on Doctor Who in 1979 as Princess Astra in the serial “The Armageddon Factor,” before joining the series the following year to take over the role of Romana, traveling companion to Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, from Mary Tamm.  After leaving the program in 1981, she later retired from acting, though she has returned to reprise the role of Romana in Big Finish’s audio series, primarily the “Gallifrey” audio series in which Romana becomes Lord President of Gallifrey. Ward’s other roles include Vampire Circus, The Duchess of Duke Street, Rosebud, England Made Me, Who Pays the Feryman? and Th e Professionals.  She’s written several books on knitting and embroidery, and is a textile artist and ceramicist, as well as for many years a trustee of Denville Hall, a UK actors’ care home.  Lalla first joined us in 2017 (her first US appearance in decades) and we are thrilled to welcome her back for a second visit, courtesy Showmasters Events.

Segun Akinola

Segun Akinola is a British-Nigerian composer for film and television best known for his work in Doctor Who, scoring the entirety of the era featuring the first female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker. A BAFTA Breakthrough Brit 2017, Segun’s other work includes scoring Apple TV+ feature 9/11: Inside The President’s War Room, the ITV drama Stephen which was executive-produced by Paul Greengrass, Sundance 2019 favourite and World Soundtrack Award nominee The Last Tree, multimedia feature A Moving Image, BBC Two’s landmark four-part series Black and British: A Forgotten History and more. His work has screened at acclaimed festivals like Sundance, the London Film Festival, SXSW Film Festival, LA Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival and many others. He has recently scored Milli Vanilli biopic Girl You Know It’s True from producers Quirin Berg and Max Wiedemann (The Lives of Others) and a documentary series for producer Richard Brown (True Detective).  This is his first-ever appearance at a Doctor Who convention.

Eric Saward

Eric Saward is a novelist and screenwriter best known to Doctor Who fans as writer and script editor on the series from 1982 to 1986.  Alongside producer John Nathan-Turner, Saward is responsible for the creative direction of the tenures of stars Peter Davison and Colin Baker, from the Season 19 story “Time Flight” through the penultimate episode of “The Trial of a Time Lord.”  During this era, he also wrote the screenplays for “The Visitation,” “Earthshock,” “Resurrection of the Daleks” and “Revelation of the Daleks,” as well as the radio play “Slipback,” and the Target & BBC Books novelizations of several of his televised stories (plus “The Twin Dilemma” and “Attack of the Cybermen”).  He’s also written multiple Doctor Who short stories, as well as linking narration for the BBC Radio Collection releases of missing Doctor Who serials.  More recently, he’s written for the Lytton comic series published by Cutaway Comics, based on the character Lytton in several Doctor Who episodes.  We are thrilled to welcome Eric to his first convention appearance in North America.

Matthew Waterhouse

Matthew Waterhouse is best known for playing Adric, the ill-fated Alzarian stowaway and companion to Tom Baker and Peter Davison’s Doctors on Doctor Who from 1980 to 1982.  His other roles have included To Serve Them All My Days, Ghostlands alongside Sylvester McCoy, The Killing Edge, as well as a wide variety of theatrical productions including Peter Pan, Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Torch Song Trilogy, multiple Shakespeare productions, and his own one-man show Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Matthew has also participated in multiple Doctor Who and Dark Shadows projects for Big Finish Productions, and has read audiobook versions of many of the Target Books novelizations.  His debut novel Fates, Flowers: A Comedy of New York was released in 2006, followed up by Vanitas: A Comedy of New York and Precious Liars, and his best-selling memoir Blue Box Boy.  Last with us back in 2014, we’re delighted to welcome Matthew back for this year, courtesy Showmasters Events.

Frazer Hines

Frazer Hines – aka Jamie McCrimmon opposite Patrick Troughton’s second Doctor – is not only as synonymous with Doctor Who as the Doctor himself, but returns for his unprecedented sixteenth appearance at Gallifrey One, where he’s become an annual tradition (every year since 2009!) Known for his work on Doctor Who as well as his long-running twenty-two-year role as Joe Sugden on the British soap Emmerdale (originally Emmerdale Farm), and his more recent appearances as Sir Fletcher Gordon on Outlander and in annual pantomimes and theatrical runs in the West End and all over Europe, Frazer has also been reprising his Jamie role for Big Finish on their many audio releases. More he’s had a cameo in the film Blood Coral and stars in the award-winning Sundown with Caitlin Blackwood, and Lost at Christmas with Sylvester McCoy.  Beloved by fans and beloved by us, it just wouldn’t be Gallifrey One without him!

Jacqueline King

Jacqueline King played the recurring role of Sylvia Noble, the overbearing, widowed mother of Catherine Tate’s character Donna Noble, in Doctor Who’s 2006 Christmas special “The Runaway Bride” and throughout the fourth series opposite Tate, David Tennant and Bernard Cribbins.  King has appeared on stage and in television and film including Comic Potential, the Damsels in Distress trlogy, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, Casualty, Life Begins, Lawless, Doctors, 55 Degrees North, Missing and The Bill; she also appeared in House of Saddam playing real-life diplomat April Glaspie.  King returned the role of Sylvia in several audios for Big Finish Productions, including in their series The Tenth Doctor Adventures, Lady Christina, and Donna Noble: Kidnapped!, and she will once again appear in the role for the upcoming Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials.  She appears courtesy Showmasters Events.

Ray Holman

Ray Holman was the primary costume designer on Doctor Who for four seasons — series five, Matt Smith’s first year; series nine with Peter Capaldi; and series eleven, twelve and thirteen with Jodie Whittaker — as well as for the stories “Blink” and “Turn Left,” and designing both Smith and Whittaker’s iconic costumes. He was also the primary costume designer on the first three series of Torchwood as well as for Steven Moffat’s series Sherlock. His first work on television was for the finale of All Creatures Great and Small (alas, after Peter Davison had departed!), and later worked on Phil Collinson’s Sea of Souls. In 2000, he was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award for his work on This is Personal – The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, and was nominated for two BAFTAs for Torchwood, winning for Series 1. More recently, he’s served as a costume designer on Broadchurch, Wizards vs Aliens, Liar, The Split, Law & Order UK and the second series of the acclaimed Fleabag created by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Jonathon Carley

Jonathon Carley plays the War Doctor, the shadowy incarnation of the Doctor originated on television by Sir John Hurt during Doctor Who‘s 50th anniversary, in Big Finish Productions’ The War Doctor Begins series.  Jonathon’s career has seen a transition from working behind the scenes into acting. His official screen debut was in To Walk Invisible, a drama about the Brontë family, written and directed by Sally Wainwright and since then has appeared in several TV dramas and commercials. Most recently he has appeared in Russell T Davies’ It’s a Sin, Series 2 of Sanditon and the sci-fi comedy short film I Made War of the Worlds.  One of his biggest passions however is voice acting; having been able to do impressions since being young, Jonathon considers himself extremely fortunate to be performing character voices as a job. He’s narrated several audiobooks and voiced characters in animated series and films and comedy sketches.  This will be his first visit to Gallifrey One, courtesy Big Finish Productions.

Mark Morris

In his 35-year career, multi-award-winning author Mark Morris has written and edited around fifty novels, novellas, short story collections and anthologies. His most recent work includes the Obsidian Heart trilogy (The Wolves of London, The Society of Blood and The Wraiths of War), the original Predator novel Stalking Shadows (co-written with James A. Moore), new audio adaptations of the classic 1971 horror movie Blood on Satan’s Claw and the M.R. James ghost story A View From a Hill, and, as editor, the anthologies After Sundown, Beyond the Veil, Close to Midnight and Darkness Beckons. His Doctor Who work includes four original novels: The Bodysnatchers, Deep Blue, Forever Autumn and Ghosts of India, the novella ‘The Dreaming’ in Tales of Trenzalore: The Eleventh Doctor’s Last Stand, and seven Big Finish audio dramas. Most recently, he has written the official BBC Books/Target novelization of the 60th anniversary special “Wild Blue Yonder,” based on the script by Russell T. Davies and starring David Tennant.

James Goss

Writer James Goss originally produced the BBC website in 2000 for a dead sci-fi brand called Doctor Who. By the time he left in 2007, the show was in much better health, and the rest is history! Since then, he’s adapted Douglas Adams’ Doctor Who scripts for BBC Books — “City of Death” and “The Pirate Planet,” as well as the never-produced “Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen” — as well as written three Target novels and a book of Doctor Who poetry (with illustrations by Russell T Davies, a clear career highlight for them both). He created the Time Lord Victorious multiplatform Doctor Who experience for BBC Studios. He’s been producing Torchwood and Bernice Summerfield for Big Finish, and recently produced series two of Doctor Who Redacted for BBC Sounds. He also worked on the animations of The Invasion, Scream of the Shalka, The Infinite Quest and 2020’s Daleks! series, and has recently novelized the forthcoming Doctor Who 60th anniversary special “The Giggle”.  This is his first visit to Gallifrey One as a convention guest.

John Dorney

Writer and actor John Dorney has written, script-edited or acted in more than a hundred of Big Finish’s Doctor Who stories and spin-offs, both the main series featuring all of the regular Big Finish Doctors as well as episodes of UNIT, Missy, Diary of River Song, Robots, Donna Noble: Kidnapped, Lady Christina, Jago & Lightfoot and Dalek Universe, as well as working on many other ranges such as Torchwood, The Omega Factor, The Avengers, Sapphire and Steel, and Survivors. His story Absent Friends won a BBC audio drama award in January 2017, and his plays The Red Lady and Iterations of I won the Scribe Award for audio. He won the BBC Show me the Funny and Sketch Factor competitions, and has written and performed for the National Theatre, The Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre and BBC Radio 4. This is John’s second visit to Gallifrey One.

Gary Russell

In a previous life, Gary Russell was once an editor of Doctor Who Magazine, and also wrote a number of Doctor Who novels, comics and non-fiction books. In 1997 he and Jason Haigh-Ellery set up Big Finish Productions, to create brand new audio adventures for the Doctor. After producing over 100 different releases, he left the company and moved to Cardiff to begin working on the show itself, as a script editor, and did the same job on Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. After a three-year exile to Australia, producing Prisoner Zero (an animated sci fi series most recently shown in the USA on Pluto) he returned to Cardiff in 2016 and since then has been overseeing the turning of old Doctor Who soundtracks into shiny new animations.  Most recently, Gary penned the novelization of the upcoming Doctor Who 60th anniversary story, “The Star Beast.”

Lisa McMullin

Lisa McMullin is a Doctor Who obsessive and screenwriter who also writes audio drama for Big Finish Productions. She has written across various Doctor Whoniverses including Gallifrey: Time War, UNIT, Torchwood, Rose Tyler: The Dimension Cannon, The Fourth Doctor Adventures, Eighth Doctor: Time War, Missy, Tenth Doctor: Out of Time, The War Master, Eighth of March, The Paternoster Gang, The Robots, and Stranded. Outside of the world of Big Finish, Lisa writes on a variety of BBC television shows (Death In Paradise, Casualty, Moving On, EastEnders, Doctors) and also has original dramas in development in the UK and US. She also writes for the theatre. You can follow Lisa on Twitter: @lisamcmullin

Simon Guerrier

Simon Guerrier is a writer and producer whose recent work includes Doctor Who: The Daily Doctor and Doctor Who: Whotopia from BBC Books, Black Archive: The Edge of Destruction from Obverse Books, and David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television from Ten Acre Films.  He’s written some 60 audio plays for Big Finish Productions, including his original series Graceless, as well as a great many Doctor Who books, audio plays and comics.  Simon writes regularly for Doctor Who Magazine and make documentaries for BBC Radio. This will be his eighth visit to Gallifrey One.

Jason Haigh-Ellery

Long-time Gallifrey One guest and friend Jason Haigh-Ellery is the Managing Director of Big Finish Productions, which recently won a Guinness Book record for “longest running science fiction audio play series.” Jason founded Big Finish in 1998, producing over 3,500 hours of award-winning audio drama, including winning two prestigious BBC Audio Drama Awards for Best Drama for Doctor Who.  In theatre, Jason has produced 16 West End shows and 26 touring shows including “Footloose”, “Fame”, “An Officer and a Gentleman” and the recent massively successful revival of “Bonnie and Clyde”.  He is also a recipient of an Olivier Award for Best Comedy for “Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense”.  He is a director of fashion brand Marfa Stance and actors agency Intertalent.  He has produced two reality shows, seven serials of animated “Doctor Who”, “Prisoner Zero” for ABC, teen drama series “More Than This” for Paramount+ and feature films “Mrs Lowry and Son” and “The Time of Their Lives” with Universal Pictures.

More news soon!

Greetings, Gallifrey One attendees!  We’d like to apologize for some of the information below coming a bit later than we’d originally anticipated posting it in August.  We have a number of convention updates below, with more coming very soon!

Guests Coming Soon!

As we noted in our last update, we’ve been busy working on guest confirmations, but have also been paying attention to the current SAG-AFTRA strike; we’ve also been looking at new guests, people we’ve never featured before.  We do expect our next convention update to bring you our first block of guests, to be followed by a second block within a month or so after that.  Needless to say, Gallifrey One’s 2024 guest lineup will be just as robust as in years past!

Art Show Space Now SOLD OUT

Space reservations in the 2024 Gallifrey One Art Show went on sale on September 9 and sold out within a few hours.  We’d like to thank everyone who bought space and will be displaying in next February’s Art Show… we look forward to seeing your work.  As a reminder, our Art Show coordinators will be in touch closer to the convention.

The Gallifrey One 2024 Art Show will be open to all convention attendees at this year’s convention on Friday and Saturday throughout convention operating hours.  Our Art Show Auction will once again take place on Sunday at 10:00am as well.

Be aware that we have added one important new Art Show rule this year: Gallifrey One will not accept any artwork generated by artificial intelligence (AI), nor any work whose creation is assisted by AI. Artificial intelligence primarily uses the work of other artists to generate imagery, and Gallifrey One does not support the reuse or modification of any artist’s original creative work.

Visit our Art Show page for complete rules and information about the Art Show.

Discussion Panel Suggestions Open Until September 30

As of today, our 2024 Discussion Panel Suggestion Form is now open, at the link below. Gallifrey One’s discussion panel track is a vital and very popular part of our convention, bringing both guests and attendees together for lively debates on various topics including Doctor Who, science fiction & fantasy television and film, comics, writing, gaming, costuming, fandom, and much more.  

This year, as always, we are seeking fan input for new topics to be discussed at the 2024 convention.  However, unlike prior years where our suggestion form has been open for a while, it will only be open for the next three weeks.  Please visit the link below and submit your panel suggestions; you can use the form for only one panel idea, but you are welcome to submit additional forms for more panels.  Also, please be sure to read the notes on the suggestion form, as there are specific types of panels we are soliciting.

The form will be closing at the end of the day on Saturday, September 30.  We then expect to release our proposed discussion panel list, and open our form for panelist requests, sometime in mid-October.  Thanks for your suggestions!

TARDIS Talks Academic Program for 2024

The TARDIS Talks academic program at Gallifrey One will definitely be back in 2024!  TARDIS Talks offer a different type of fan discussion at our convention… not just for academics, but also for fans who want to discuss topics about Doctor Who in greater depth. Rather than a traditional fan discussion panel, TARDIS Talks offer speakers a longer time to speak (ten to fifteen minutes) about a topic they’re passionate about, with a discussion after all the speakers. In addition, the TARDIS Talks feature an invited Keynote Speaker each year.

Not sure what to talk about? Don’t worry! Everyone has some area of expertise that we’d love to hear about. A list of previous topics from the past four years are included on the TARDIS Talks page here on our website.

Interested in speaking in the TARDIS Talks program? Please review the TARDIS Talks page, then submit a 200-300 word presentation proposal via the TARDIS Talks Google Form linked below; the deadline for submissions is November 15, 2023.  After that date, our academic program chairs Joy Piedmont and Paul Booth will read through the submitted proposals and organize the accepted ones onto panels, and then work with the convention organizers on the final list. Good luck!

Masquerade of Mandragora for 2024

For nearly three decades, Gallifrey One has presented The Masquerade of Mandragora, our annual costume presentation featuring the best and brightest cosplay from the world of Doctor Who and popular culture.  Although the Masquerade has taken a few breaks over the years, it made its latest return in 2023, and we’re happy to announce that it will be back in 2024.

This year, we will be continuing our new fashion show-style format that we introduced in 2023, with one modification: we feel that this year the amount of time we gave each entrant for presenting on the stage was too short, so we’ll be increasing that amount of time.  As was the cast this past February, we are no longer doing any judging, nor permitting any on-stage performances beyond presentation of costumes (including no custom music), as it was unwieldy for our staff.  We feel that a fashion show focuses on the most important part of the event: the costumes, and the costumers themselves.

The 2024 Masquerade of Mandragora will take place on Friday night in our main auditorium (Program A); all convention attendees are welcome and seating is first-come first-served.  More details about our 2024 Masquerade can be found on our Masquerade page on our website, with additional information to be posted at a later date.

Exhibitor Table Space Limited

As always, Gallifrey One will have a limited amount of free exhibitor tables (fan tables) available for use at the convention.  These tables, once again located inside the Gallifrey One Dealers Room, are set aside for fan clubs, conventions, organizations and individuals to exhibit their events/services; they cannot be used to sell merchandise.  Although there is no cost for an exhibitor table, we do not provide free admission; anyone working these tables must have a paid ticket to the event.  

We have a very limited number of tables still available, so if you are interested in using one of them, please contact us as soon as possible.  Organizations using exhibitor tables must agree to keep their tables open and staffed during Friday and Saturday Dealers Room hours (10:00am to 6:00pm both days); we also ask that they open their tables on Sunday but specific times that day are not required.  Let us know if you’d like to participate!

Gallifrey One Program Book Ads

Interested in advertising in our annual souvenir program booklet? We sell a limited number of ads in our booklet, which is distributed to every person who attends the convention. Ads must be genre-specific: science fiction, fantasy & horror literature, media or comics, as well as conventions and events, fan clubs, or items of suitable interest to our attendees.  Our deadline for booking advertisements in the Gallifrey One 2024 program book is December 15, 2023, though we reserve the right to close ads earlier if we reach our limit, so please get in touch with us as soon as possible! (The ads themselves will be due in mid-January.)

The specifications for ads and rates can be found on our Program Book Advertising page.  Contact us via our Contact Page to reserve space in our Program Book for 2024.

More news soon…

Greetings, Gallifrey One fans! We’re taking a quick break from our own summer holidays to let you know that, even though things have been quiet with us since our hotel reservations date and the announcement of our charity for 2024 back in the spring, many irons are indeed in the fire. Just to give you a few notes about what we’re working on, and a few things you should keep an eye on:

For starters, we are already working on guests for next year. We made the decision to wait until closer to the event this year, and that was because of multiple reasons. First, we wanted to see what sort of impact the ongoing strike would have on our guest pool (make no mistake, we support the writers and actors completely.)

Second, we have been working on a couple major headline guests over the past few months and knew they’d be confirmed much closer to the event. And finally, we’ve heard from many of you who wanted us to focus on guests we haven’t seen before, or guests that we haven’t had in a long while… All of that means we should have some exciting news soon. We expect to start announcing guests in September, with headliners coming a bit later than that.

Meanwhile, a few important pieces of business are coming over the next few weeks:

We will shortly be opening up reservations in the Gallifrey One 2024 Art Show; those artists who were with us in 2023 will hear from us first, then we’ll make a public announcement for sales.

We will also soon open up submissions of ideas for fan discussion panels. We’re looking for some unique panel ideas (less of the usual ‘favorite episode’, ‘favorite Doctor,’ ‘rehash season X’ etc. stuff, more of the unique spin on popular Doctor Who and genre topics.) Please note that the submissions deadline will be much tighter this year (not the two months you have seen before) as we want to get these open for panelist requests during the month of October, so expect to see that by the end of this month.

And finally, we’d like to put in a good word for our sister convention Long Island Who, which has moved from the cold of November to the summertime of mid-August. It’s shaping up to be a great convention, and we definitely encourage you to check it out.

That’s what’s happening over the next two months… which takes into the fall. That’s when we start fully ramping things up; event and program updates will commence around Thanksgiving and take us through January when our full schedule comes out.

Stay tuned – we have tons of great stuff coming, as we approach the six month mark until Gallifrey One’s Miracle on 34th Street in February. See you there!

Marriott LAX Hotel Reservations Update

Hotel reservations at the Marriott Los Angeles Airport Hotel for Gallifrey One 2024 opened this past Friday, May 12.  As expected, the discount block filled up almost immediately and is currently sold out as of May 14.  

For those who were unable to get into the hotel, we encourage everyone to keep checking back periodically over the days and weeks to come, as cancellations may come in. Also, select rooms may still be available at higher rack rates; you can access those by doing a general room search at the hotel without our group code. If you’re missing a night or more on your discount room reservation, make a separate one at rack rate so your stay is entirely at the Marriott. 

For reference, the link to our convention discount block is here. Individual nights may become available after cancellations happen down the road.

We are delighted that so many of you were able to get in, not only in the initial rush at noon, but in the hours that followed. And as a reminder, our Hotel Accommodations page on our website has details about many hotels in the local area, some only a short walk away (and all easily accessed via taxi/rideshare as well.)

An Open Letter: How We Do Reservations

The following open letter about our hotel reservations event and the processes and people invovled was shared on our Facebook pages on May 14; we wanted to make sure everyone had the chance to read it. Yes, it’s a long one, but may give you some insight into how and why things happen with hotel reservations the way they do.

Hello, Gallifrey One attendees! This past Friday was our annual hotel reservations event at the Marriott LAX, and we know that for all of you, it’s a very stressful day. It is for us, too. And it also always breeds lots of questions about the way we do it, why we use Facebook, how it all works behind the scenes, and of course, do we really mean what we say about checking tickets? We thought we’d use this opportunity to share some insight with all of you, a peek behind the curtain, to answer those questions.

For starters, we should mention that there’s a two-person team of Gallifrey One Board of Directors members who work on the hotel reservations event. Our facilities director Joyce Lloyd interfaces with our event partners at the Marriott LAX to keep things running on their end throughout the day: getting the event reservations page ready, keeping it private until it goes live, and then when it does, seeing how they can adjust things (like boosting numbers on the shoulder nights before and after the convention.) Joyce also works with the Marriott on everything from hotel contracts to food trucks to restaurant & bar offerings to those hotel carpet squares we’ve been auctioning off for charity each year. On the other side is our program director Shaun Lyon, who manages the public end of everything: writing all the language on the website, answering tons of emails before the reservations event, getting the links online, and then managing the fallout, both on Facebook and by email (and is the only person who works on Gallifrey One year-round every year.) When we say it’s a stressful day for us as much as it is for you, we’re not kidding (for the record, it’s our least favorite day of the year, too.)

It would be even worse if we didn’t have *wonderful* partners at the Marriott LAX who do everything they can to make it work. Many people wonder why we do this on a weekday, instead of a Saturday… we’d love to do it on the weekend, but we have to do it during their regular business hours. We pick Fridays because it’s the easiest on the Marriott staff, the most likely weekday attendees will be able to access it, and at a time that works best for the vast majority of our attendees in Pacific time, but also a good time for attendees throughout North America (and at 8pm in the UK, because we get a lot of folks from there, too.)

Like all conventions, we contract for a specific number of discounted rooms. It’s not the entire hotel. People ask why this is the case, and it’s very simple: there is a ratio between the amount of function space we take, and how many sleeping rooms we have to fill so we offset the function space and not have to pay for it. (This is a standard thing all conventions do.) Over time, as we’ve taken over the entirety of the Marriott’s function space, the number of hotel “room nights” required to meet our threshold has increased in kind (one hotel room occupied one night = one room night.) So, as we’ve gotten larger over the years, we’ve been on the hook to fill more hotel rooms; as the size of our commitment has grown, the number of hotel rooms available on our discount block has increased.

As you can see, it’s important for us to fill up our convention discount block, because when we do, we don’t pay anything for the use of the hotel’s ballrooms. That means we can spend the money from your ticket where it matters most: on our guest list, our program and events, and the things that make the convention special. This is the primary reason why we now require someone already have a non-refundable paid ticket: last-minute cancellations on our hotel block impact us financially, so we’ve eliminated the reserving of hotel rooms on speculation; now people have some skin in the game. (More on that requirement later in this article.)

But not all of the Marriott’s sleeping rooms are in our block. Most of the hotels in the LAX area have contracts with airlines to house flight crews (we’re sure you’ve all seen them on the lobby level and in the elevators.) The Marriott also offers a subset of rooms not part of our contract at regular rate – also called ‘rack’ rate – or with special rates offered such as AAA members. We do get the VAST majority of our sleeping rooms offered as part of our contracted block (about 80-85% of the hotel.) However, the amount of those discount rooms on our block vary based upon the night. Friday & Saturday nights are by far the most popular; we still get a lot of people who arrive on Friday and stay through Sunday. Thursday & Sunday nights (what we call ‘shoulder nights’ as they’re technically before and after the convention) are also popular, but our contracted amounts are slightly smaller on those nights… which is why searches for that longer period may show no rooms available, but removing Thursday and/or Sunday achieves success. The amounts are even smaller for the couple of days before and after that period.

Our reservations day issues, and the immense frustration that it brings, is also a product of our success over the years. Many people want to get into the Marriott; it’s easier and more convenient being there for everything. We’d love a thousand more rooms at the Marriott, but they don’t exist. People have asked us, and this is germane to the topic of hotel room space, why the Marriott? Why not a larger venue? We got a lot of that when we were selling out the convention in a few minutes, but we knew that in this new golden age of TV, interests would shift and the series may not be as popular in future years. (For the record, this year we barely sold the convention out two weeks before, and we offer about 600 fewer tickets than we did before the pandemic.) No hotel in Los Angeles gives us the flexibility we have, the size of our function space, and the ease of access to an international airport as the Marriot does… a hotel that most of our major guests fly eleven hours into from London and would prefer not to have to commute across the busiest freeways in the world to get to. It was the best fit for us when we moved here, and that’s the reason we stay.

This has left us with trying to navigate how to do the worst day of the Gallifrey One year some justice. The way we do it today is the best possible option. Since it’s pretty obvious to everyone that the key to a hotel room reservation right off the bat depends on about ten to fifteen seconds after seeing the link, we decided to offer that link in one reliable location: our Facebook event page. Our website can’t handle a massive amount of traffic at once without creaking. Twitter is unreliable; the propagation of tweets is different for everyone (especially these days after the recent takeover) We were offering it on our primary Facebook page, but last year we received a bunch of complaints that people didn’t see it, because it wasn’t updating consistently for everyone. That’s why we chose the 2024 event page… if you’re constantly refreshing it, you’ll see it. It’s the only fair way to post the link and ensure everyone sees it at the same time. We think offering the same opportunity to everyone is a best practice.

Some people have asked why we don’t send the link via email to everyone who’s bought tickets already. This question invariably presupposes two things, integrity and reliability. For starters, an email blast to our attendees may get stuck in people’s spam folders (it happens far more often than one might think; we get emails stuck in OUR spam folder all the time.) Sending out the email blast to everyone at exactly the moment hotel rooms become available is a non-starter, because email is delivered at different rates to different mail services. And what about sending everyone with tickets the link in advance and letting them have the advantage? That’s the integrity issue… there’s no way that link is not going to get shared with the public, on Facebook pages, on Twitter, and so forth, and then it becomes exactly the same problem as we have now.

The only possible solution we’ve considered in the past is a lottery-style event, but that’s not going to happen. Not only do we not have the capacity to organize all of the hotel reservation data ourselves, we’re also not taking people’s credit card numbers. We also don’t want to be responsible for randomizing who gets in and who doesn’t. We think people having more control over their own hotel destiny is infinitely more preferable.

So we rely on the date-and-time Facebook event page post; it’s the only time we rely on Facebook to do something convention-related. And yes, it wasn’t there at exactly noon this year; it was posted at 12:03pm, according to our program director’s clock. This was because we have to verify the link is working when it goes live, as well as get everything ready to release to the public. If you don’t see a post that the link will be late, then please just give us a few minutes to get things done on our end. We promise we aren’t going to leave you hanging.

A few other random hotel-related things to note…

Many of you wonder how rooms pop up ten, twenty, thirty minutes after the crush… we’ve seen people who got into the hotel in the evening, or even the day after. There are multiple factors at work. A reservation is held as soon as it’s started, for a certain amount of time, so it can be completed; if it’s not, it’s released back into the block. Some people accidentally booked multiple rooms, or were part of a small group making multiple attempts to get one room to share; those are released as soon as they’re canceled or discontinued. And some of it is rebalancing our nightly numbers. Although frustrating at the time, it’s the reason why so many people have been reporting they were able to get in despite missing the start of the reservations event.

We get questions from people asking us to extend their limited discount block reservations to include additional nights they missed. We’d love to do that for everyone, but as noted above, we only get the rooms we get. We encourage you to keep trying to get a separate reservation for the nights you missed out on via our discount block link, or at the rack rate. While we can’t get you the discount rate for rack rate or other group rate tagged room nights, it’s still better than having to move hotels.

We get a lot of questions about mass-reservation of rooms. Yes, we experienced an event years ago where one person reserved a large block of rooms, then attempted to resell those rooms to others at an upcharge. Needless to say, we’ve taken ample precautious against that ever happening again. Some people do reserve more than one room, because they’re booking for themselves and friends or family members. So, no, no one’s prevented you from getting in because they’ve booked a ton of rooms; anyone who reserves more than two rooms in their name on our convention block is automatically looked into by our wonderful Marriott partners.

And that leads us to the question we’ve been getting more than any other: do we *really* check our list against the hotel reservations? Yes, we will. No, it doesn’t happen the same day as hotel reservations (again… two people doing this. Let’s be realistic here.) We’ll be doing that check against our ticket list this coming week. Anyone who has a reservation on our convention discount block and doesn’t have a ticket will be contacted, either by us or by the hotel. We’re not just going to have the Marriott cancel a reservation without contacting the party in question, and we have other ways of verifying including email address; plus, we know a lot of you just from past experience already. (You are very welcome to send us email if you have a different name on your room than your ticket, though; this really does help us.) No, it doesn’t mean that if you didn’t have a ticket at 12:01pm on Friday but bought yours at 2:35pm Saturday instead, your reservation will be canceled; as long as you have a ticket by the time we review the list, you’re golden.

We hope that this has given you some insight into how things work with Gallifrey One hotel reservations. This convention is a labor of love that, one that some of us have been working on since we started it in 1989. And you, our beloved attendees, pay for your ticket; rest assured that we take that responsibility VERY seriously, and do our absolute best to provide you with a weekend to remember. We put a lot of thought into EVERYTHING, and that includes your hotel reservations experience. But we also stress that we provide this discount block reservations opportunity as a courtesy only. It is not the convention’s responsibility to house everyone, just to put on a great show. The Marriott reservations event requires persistence and stamina, and even some creativity, from our attendees to get into the hotel when there are more people wanting rooms than can be accommodated. As we’ve also said, repeatedly, there are plenty of hotels in the area, many within a five minute walk away (a list can be found on our Hotel Reservations page on the Gallifrey One website.) If you’re not comfortable with walking from another hotel, there are ample taxis, Uber and Lyft rides available; we are, after all, near one of the busiest airports in the world.

Finally, this reservations event usually marks the end of our busy spring (the post-con / pre-next-con period) and the beginning of our annual summer break. But this year, we’ve got one more thing coming before that happens: we’ll be announcing our 2024 charity beneficiary by the end of the month (subject to confirmation). After that, we’ll have a few guest updates during the summer, and then start ramping up plans for the convention in the fall. There’s a lot coming this year and we have BIG plans, so stay tuned!

We’d like to thank everyone at the LAX Marriott hotel for being incredible partners.

And as always, thank YOU for your support of Gallifrey One. We couldn’t do this without you.

Gallifrey One 33 1/3: Long Live the Revolution is in the books... and we want to thank all of YOU for helping us make it happen! This is a report on everything that happened at this year's convention, with special thanks given... and a preview of 2024!