Yes, GSA has reserved hotel rooms for the dates of 19–26 Sept. If you try to reserve a room online and certain nights are not available, you will be placed on a waitlist. Waitlists occur when one or more nights of your stay cannot be immediately confirmed. Orchid.Events routinely works with hotels to add room inventory outside of our “official” dates. Your waitlist will be cleared within seven business days and you will receive a “100% confirmed” confirmation. In the event that Orchid.Events cannot confirm your entire stay, you will be notified via email and offered alternatives.

Only hotels that have availability for the dates you requested will show up as an option to make a reservation. Some hotels only have king rooms, so if you requested a room with 2 beds, the hotel won’t show up as an option. The smaller hotels (those with 100 rooms or less) are sometimes the least expensive. They will fill up quickly, resulting in limited availability. You can try modifying your search by entering different arrival and departure dates. You can also check at a later time to see if any rooms have become available due to cancellations.

The hotels will not download any of their GSA reservations until 12 Sept. Prior to this time a reservations agent at the hotel will show that all the rooms in the GSA block are still available in their system. The rooms won’t appear to be “filled” until 11 Sept., after the hotels receive the room reservations from Orchid.Events.

Hotels will not allow GSA to reserve their entire room inventory. They retain a portion for transient business and other contract business. The hotel may charge variable rates based on demand. If they make any of these rooms available to the public over our dates, they may raise the prices on those rooms due to limited inventory and increased demand. GSA has no control over hotel room pricing outside of the reserved housing block.

No, we cannot assist with individual reservations made outside of the GSA housing block. If you choose to book outside of the block, you will have to pay the going rate and work directly with the hotel regarding special requests and/or changes to your reservation. Orchid.Events and GSA cannot access reservations booked outside of the block and, therefore, cannot change the rate on a reservation made directly with the hotel.

We do not have hotels in our room block at the government per diem. If you must have a government rate, the best option is to contact the hotel directly and see if they are offering the government rate. Another option is to share a room; please see the Roomates & Rides discussion forum.

Each hotel manages their own policies regarding member rewards. In most instances, GSA’s group discount supersedes hotel rewards program benefits, meaning you may not be able to apply existing points toward your room bill. If you want to know how a particular hotel handles rewards points in association with their GSA group rooms, please contact that hotel directly.