Hotel
The convention will be held at the Holiday Inn Select Airport in Bloomington, Minnesota. The hotel is conveniently located between the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport and the Mall of America with shuttle service available to both. Both the airport and the mall are accessible via Light Rail and there’s a Light Rail stop that isn’t far from the hotel. There’s a free parking ramp adjacent to the hotel.
You can register online for the hotel’s preferred customer program.
Amenities
Other cool things about the hotel: free wireless internet access available throughout the entire hotel, spacious bar, restaurant with decent breakfast buffet as well as lunch and dinner service, good function space, nice pool and hot tub, an attached health club, very nice (and affordable) suites, and a friendly staff that is pretty darn used to hosting science fiction conventions by now (local conventions MarsCon, Diversicon, CONsume, and Convivial have all been held there in recent years). Here’s a link to the hotel’s page about their amenities.
Room Rates & Availability
Our room block is now closed. Our room rate was $95 for a King or Double, $125 for a Suite. Most suites have a sitting room that is separate from the bedroom with a sleeper sofa, desk, mini fridge, microwave, coffee maker, and second TV. There are also some suites that feature murphy beds which we think is a very cool thing.
It is possible there are still rooms available, you can contact the hotel at (952) 854-9000 or (800) 465-4329. Technically it’s too late to get in on our room block, but you can try telling them you’re with “Fourth Street Fantasy Convention” anyway and you might get lucky and get our rate or at the very least they’ll know you’re with us. It appears rooms can be booked online, but you can’t specify that you’re with any group; if you reserve online you might want to tell the front desk when you check in that you’re with Fourth Street so that they (and we) know.
Smoking rooms are available on the 12th floor if you’d like one (and in our experience, smoke doesn’t leak from that floor to the adjacent floors).
Full disclosure: I’m cribbing a lot from the pages for Convivial 3 which will be the third convention I’ve chaired at this hotel. You might find those pages useful as I haven’t pulled all the useful data out of them yet for these pages. -Laurel
