Covid And The State Of San Francisco Hotels in 2024

When the Covid 19 pandemic sucker punched the world in general, but hotels specifically, no one could have predicted how it would have affected the hospitality community.

The nature of hospitality in particular was already beginning to morph, but was exacerbated and accelerated by the pandemic.  Once the Corona Virus hit, we went from a nation of diners and travelers to a nation of Netflix-bingers and Door-Dashers in an instant.

I watched in sadness as beloved restaurants, many internationally renowned, now shuttered forever.  With almost 4,000 in San Francisco alone, it became inevitable that I would see a restaurant, where young honeymooners once shared with me how it was the perfect place to cement their lifetime commitment.  Now they are boarded up with a ‘For Lease’ sign on it.   It was traumatic watching my beloved profession hemorrhage a thousand jobs a day.

Fields adjacent to travel and tourism (like airlines, rental cars, and even event planners) were affected, but still managed to operate albeit at a skeletal level.  For context, my brother worked in education as the manager of student services for a community college, and my sister is a psychiatrist and had to adjust to this planet-wide trauma never encountered before. And although scaled back, their professions managed to stumble along.

Not so for hotels.  Be you a general manager of an exclusive five-star resort catering to celebrities and royalty, or the janitor of a roadside Motel 6, your job was obliterated after March 16th.  Whether you worked in a hotel in London, Tokyo, or Niagara Falls, your job was gone.  Instantly and totally.

If you were a mid-level front desk or food and beverage manager in a popular destination like Las Vegas or Hawaii, it would not have been beyond the realm of reason that you may have lost your job due to the after-effects of the 9/11 terrorists attacks, or the 2008 recession.  But it was also possible to move to a different city and find work in your field, despite the disruption to your life.  The pandemic of 2020 upended hospitality the world over, like nothing I'd ever seen.  

From Cape Town, South Africa to Anchorage, Alaska there was not one corner of this planet where hospitality was not devastated.  You couldn't just pack your suitcase and move to another city because every city's hotel business was decimated. As far as I can tell no other industry shut down completely, worldwide and overnight. 

Boom!  Just like that.

Finding moments of joy in a devastated San Francisco

In 2019 I had to leave the profession to caretake for a loved one with a serious health issue.  She got better and upon her recovery, I indicated to the world I am announcing my glorious return to hospitality.  My timing couldn’t have been better planned as it was March of 2020.  Just as a I had planned to return to hospitality the pandemic struck, essentially kneecapping any opportunity to work in a hotel, or just about any other business for that matter.

Many of the people in San Francisco hotel community I’ve worked with over the last three decades, I only knew through their @Hyatt or @Hilton email addresses.  I managed to find some on Facebook, but many had simply changed careers or disappeared.  What started as rather tightly-knit group of seasoned concierges has now become a diaspora.

Just what is the state of hospitality in San Francisco four years later?  It’s a mixed bag.

Because of decisive action taken by the city early on, San Francisco saw fewer Covid deaths than even cities with half its population.  When hundreds of smaller hotels were facing mass closures, many proprietors were able to keep their lights on because the state stepped in and foot the bill for those in the most vulnerable and susceptible demographic: homeless seniors and families.

This is a good thing.  However, I am torn.  On the one hand I am grateful that the most underserved and vulnerable have a place to call home, that is not a back alley.  On the other, I mourn for the loss of unique boutique hotels, many of which I worked in.  Many have storied histories like the Carlton, where Sir Edmund Hillary stayed and for which their lone suite was named after. 

The once famous Diva Hotel, gone forever

The Diva Hotel, located in the Theater District, and welcomed notable celebrities from Joan Rivers to Billy Crystal.  These little boutique hotels are now providing shelter to those in need, but their unique stories and place in San Francisco history are gone forever.

It certainly didn’t help having the mainstream media, and Fox News in particular, endlessly repeat San Francisco’s Doom Loop requiem as a Soylent Green-like dystopian hellscape.  According the TravelSF, the city’s convention and visitor’s office, the city welcomed a whopping 23 million visitors in 2023.  Those are pre-pandemic numbers.

Some of those visitors were world leaders who attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) convention in October 2023.  The conference also welcomed support staff and hundreds of reporters who journeyed from 30 nations along the Pacific Rim.  It was the city’s clarion call to the world that we are not only a tourist destination, but relevant as an international destination for diplomacy and business.

The APEC Convention in 2023

The cable cars are crowded, and few people are wearing masks anymore.  But take a walk along the popular tourist corridors of Fisherman’s Wharf and Union Square and you can’t help but notice there are more ‘For Lease’ signs than ‘Open for Business’ signs.  The first four blocks of Powell Street, between Union Square and the Market Street cable car turnaround, is a major tourist destination.  Yet I estimate two thirds of the storefronts are still empty in the summer of 2024. 

Commercial property owners decided they would rather pay the taxes, the insurance, and the security on a storefront sitting empty for half a decade.  Rather than lowering the rent just to get any business in there.  They are rich, so it doesn't affect their daily lives, but they don't seem to understand what the deleterious effects are on the surrounding neighborhood.  In this case, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the city.

Adjusting to post-pandemic San Francisco

By July of 2022, the tourists started to return, and it filled my heart with joy to see the cable cars humming again.   But this rush to get heads in beds didn't take into consideration that, although the hotel business was ramping up, the infrastructure to support those tourists are still devastated. The Hilton's and Hyatt's may be open again, but not the snow globe/T-Shirt shops next door.

It is a macabre ghostly sight to see lines of people waiting to ride the cable cars, in front of block after block of vacant shops. And it speaks volumes to me that whatever normal is, we're not there yet, and I don't know when (if) we ever will. Not the normal I remember from 2019, anyway. 

You’d think after being shuttered completely for the better part of a year, one would assume the hotels would want to ramp back up as soon as possible.  I heard from too many career hospitality people, some of whom worked for decades at the same hotel, that when they got calls to return to work it was as a new applicant. 

Many of them were coldly informed that the schedule and wage they took years to earn before the pandemic, was simply erased and they would have to apply as if they had never worked a day in the profession.  With this palpable disrespect emanating from bosses they worked with for decades, a lot of them said screw it and left the profession altogether.

Because of the arrogance of hotel management’s spitting on the livelihoods of people who made their own careers possible, they were stuck with a dilemma:  Millions of visitors were returning to San Francisco, but not the staffs to accommodate them.  What followed was a mad scramble by hotels to hire someone (anyone!) to move that luggage and clean those rooms.  As these hotels ironically compete with each other for an ever-dwindling experienced applicant pool, there was one post-pandemic position they were not filling - the concierge. 

It wasn’t that long ago owners of the major hotel chains had names like Marriott or Hyatt, but like too many businesses the ones that sign the checks in hospitality now have names like Singapore Hedge Fund LLC and Evergreen Investments.  And for them, now that we have the internet, a concierge is as necessary as the fins of a '57 Chevy.  But as ubiquitous and ever-present as the intent is, it still has limitations for the average visitor to San Francisco.

When I was a hotel concierge, I remeber one particular guest approached my desk with what looked like a phone book.  The visitor said he entered, 'Best Chinese Restaurants,' and plopped down on my desk a stack of papers.  He discovered there are a lot of Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, and came to me to help him figure out which one of the thousand options he printed out to go to.  Let us not forget how restaurants have been known to troll their competitors, so it is often up to a learned individual (read, concierge) to help the guest figure it out. 

In January of 2023, I happened to be walking by the Marriott Marquis Hotel, the flagship property for Marriott in San Francisco.  I remembered one of my favorite concierges, Dan Callahan, had worked there for decades and I recently stopped by to see what happened to him.

I expected to find a concierge desk altered by the events of the last four years, but what I did not expect to find was that the concierge desk was removed altogether!  I asked a security guard standing in the busy lobby what to do if a guest in this convention center-adjacent hotel wants a restaurant recommendation?  She said she was told to inform anyone with questions like that to go online and look it up.

Imagine you are a keynote speaker at a major convention, and you are staying at the Marriott Marquis.  You want to dine with a couple of colleagues, go to the lobby for a recommendation from the concierge, only to find a polite but uninformed security guard who tells you to look it up.

San Franciscans creatively coping with the Covid crisis

It will probably be another decade before historians have enough perspective to truly chronicle the events of the first half of the 2020s.  As my doctor told me when I contacted Covid, this is still a young disease, which didn’t exist five years ago.  Despite the impatience of the general public’s desire to race back to normal, the medical community is still learning of the post-pandemic side effects.  I would say hotels are still learning how to navigate a post-pandemic world as well, despite believing they already have.