I haven't been paying attention this year, but not hearing anything might also answer my own question: does anyone know if the AA folks found out about their acceptance early enough to get priority housing this year? Last year it was ridiculous how the AA folks were treated in this regard, causing many of them to lose out on housing.
Having either priority housing times or blocks set aside for those in AA, press, industry, etc. or those who are physically disabled was something brought up a number of times last year when the housing fiasco was pretty huge. I think it's a great idea, myself. I would imagine that a priority booking time would be easier to implement and wouldn't require as much guessing at numbers than actually setting aside rooms. Obviously, attendees would need to provide some sort of official documentation -- the documentation needed to get industry badges, AA acceptance numbers, disabled parking permits or other official medical documentation, etc. -- since a lot of people would probably try to abuse this system if the requirements were lax. Standards of who or what qualifies would also need to be set. I'd imagine that people would apply for priority booking by sending in their documentation (whatever it may be) and then the con would put these people in a priority booking window that opens before everyone else's booking window. This would allow people freedom of choice on which hotels they wanted, as well as preventing the con from possibly setting aside too many or too few rooms for this group. People accepted in AA could possibly even be automatically placed into this group without having to specifically apply for it.
Of course, this would require the con to have everything re: press and industry and AA together before pre-reg even opens, and that doesn't sound likely, knowing this con.