More Awesome Than You!

I apologize if this has been asked before, but..

I'm having a little trouble with my game. I've tried other sites but no one seems to have an answer to it. My problem is that I have created my own hotel in one of the vacation villages, however whenever I select to book a vacation, it does not show up on the list. Also, if I select "choose upon arrival", I still can't select it. The lot IS marked as a vacation lot, but I really can't understand why I can't go into it. I have tried turning off custom content, but it still does not work. I can check into all other hotels but not this one. This is the only hotel I have made on my own though, I haven't tried making other hotels and see if those work as well so I don't know if its all hotels that I make or just this one in particular.

Does anyone know why this may be happening?

Thanks in advance.

When you started it, did you use a community lot or a residental lot to build it? I am pretty sure it may be that residental lots built in a BV neighborhood nets you a vacation home. Try to see if it's available for purchase as a vacation home.

No, it was built as a community lot. It even gives off that blueish highlight whenever you hover over it with the mouse. It just doesn't let me click, or rather gives me no options when I try to click on it. I can only go in to build but not stay in it.

You've got the hotel desk and any other bits and pieces hotels need? You built it in the vacation hood?

Did you 'changelotzoning hotel' before you saved it?

Yes, I do have the concierge desk and it was built in a vacation neighborhood, but what else do I really need?


Sorry, I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you didn't do it, and that's what you need. :)  Go into the new hotel you built in build mode, open the cheats window (CTRL-SHIFT-C) and type what I put above into the window.  Hit enter.  That changes the lot from a regular community lot to a hotel.

Ah, I see. I tried it and it works well now. Thank you so much.  :)

But just out of curiosity, why do you need to do that? Is it designed so that you must put in that cheat or is it a bug? Because if someone that had just bought the game didn't know about cheats, they'd never be able to play in their own hotels.

It's a hold-over from Uni, since hotels actually behave like dorms in many ways, so they probably used much of the same code. You're prevented from making major changes to a dorm or existing hotel so you don't 'break' it (but the dorm build cheat actually lets you edit them after the fact, but that's a different topic).  So if players wanted to make their own dorms, they had to build them as residential lots first, and then 'change the zoning' to make it a dorm.  EAxis just carried that into hotels, with the difference being that hotels start as comm lots. So it's working as designed.  You can also use the same zoning cheat to convert lots back to comm or residential if you so desire, or want to do heavy editing.

And this cheat (and all the others) are actually documented in the 'READ ME' text file that comes with the EP, an icon for which is found in your start menu. Just goes to show that most folks don't 'READ ME' in spite of its demanding name. :)

It's sort of like why I have an RTFM I don't actually expect anyone to read. :P