News
Anime Boston Congoers Report 9-Hour Registration Waits
posted on by Mikhail Koulikov
Many attendees of this past weekend's Anime Boston convention are complaining about the apparent failure of its registration system, which led to some of them having to endure lines of up to 10 hours on Friday before either picking up or paying for their badges. Many others report waits of six or more hours, both on the Friday of the convention, and on the Saturday.
Registration was supposed to be open until 10:00 p.m. on Friday, March 21, according to Anime Boston's website and schedule. However, at one point in the evening, Hynes Convention Center security personnel stopped allowing people to enter the building unless they had already registered.
On Saturday morning, Tuan Pham, Anime Boston's director of public relations, posted an apology for the delays on the AnimeBoston.com forums. He attributed the situation to the fact that the convention had underestimated how long it would take attendees to enter their registration details into self-service computer terminals. According to attendee complaints, however, the bigger issue was the simple lack of enough computers and staff to accommodate the convention's attendees in a relatively speedy manner. The official attendance figures for Anime Boston 2008 are not yet available, but estimates run as high as 15,000 paid attendees, which is up from 10,559 last year.
