anyone had a phantom program experience

I had a similar experience last time I went through the match. A program had invited me to interview, I responded with my preference for interview date, and then never heard from the program coordinator again. I ran into the program director on another occasion, and asked about it. He had seen my application, and invited me to make an individual appointment to interview with him instead of going through the program coordinator.

It seemed sketchy to me, so I never took him up on it. Eventually they matched an internal candidate, whom I'd met at another interview, and who had told me he wanted to match at his home program (which had one residency spot).

So, yeah, that's one possible explanation.

 

An awful lot of residency programs don't provide hotels or hotel information to their interviewees, so this part of your comment is not so surprising. Nor is the schedule always made known ahead of time. The norm actually seems to be to hear when and where to show up and how long the day will last.

 

The one time I didn't get _any_ info, it was just a mistake. I got left off the email that was sent to everybody else, and when I finally got in touch with the PC, she was super apologetic about it. She continued to apologize to me on the day I came, though it really wasn't that big a deal to me -- I was local enough that I wasn't making hotel reservations or anything, just needed to know a time and place to show up.