Comic-Con Parking Site Overwhelmed

San Diego's pop culture extravaganza is selling parking spaces two months ahead of the event, but they're hard to come by

Clayton Davison took a day off from work so he could buy parking passes for San Diego Comic-Con. But even though the pop culture convention is more than two months away, the parking spaces were nearly impossible to buy.

"We get on and it crashes, and an hour rolls by and we hear nothing," said Davison.  As it turns out, the Ace Parking website was overwhelmed by the response on it's first day of sales.

"Everyone is just trying to figure out what happened so we can make it better," said Kristin Ludwick with Ace Parking.

At one point the website experienced 6,000 hits every minute and the site could not keep up.

"Everyone is buzzing, trying to answer phone calls and emails, really trying to address each individual situation," said Ludwick.

Ace is offering 22,000 parking spaces from 10 different sites near the San Diego Convention Center, where Comic-Con will be held from July 24 through July 27.

But many people like Clayton Davison couldn't get through.

"People were getting errors at the check-out process," said Davison. "It was saying the email address is invalid or 'please correct error E' which none of us knew what it was."

People at Ace Parking say they are making improvements and a day later, Davison was able to buy a parking space.

Now the parking company is trying to respond to customers and work out technical problems. After that they will try to figure out how to improve the Comic-Con parking situation for next year.

The event, which floods the streets of downtown San Diego with costumes and attendees summer after summer, is completely sold out.

In the past, the Comic-Con ticket sales website has experienced glitches and hiccups, including in November 2010 when fans trying to purchase tickets to the 2011 convention were met with frustrating error messages as the website crashed during the high-traffic frenzy for badges.

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