San Francisco Hotels and Covid Five Years later: Part III

Five years ago, the Covid 19 Pandemic struck, upending all of our lives.  Be you Tom Hanks or an essential worker, we all had to start from scratch and figure out how to create a language for dealing with a once-in-a-century pandemic.  Now that it's been half a decade, I thought I would take this opportunity to see how the city, and hospitality, is faring in 2025.

As 2024 rolled around San Francisco prepared for major city-wide races for mayor, DA, and half of the supervisor seats - our legislative body.  Despite the fact by all accounts, travel and tourism is still the number one revenue-generator in San Francisco, if you read their literature and listen to their many debates, you would be hard pressed to find any mention of our city's premier industry. 

With the exception of one candidate who did say that the perception of public corruption had left a black mark on the city, and that has affected how people perceive us, none of the other candidates recognized the value and importance of the hospitality business in San Francisco.  That was the only statement I heard that even came close to recognizing the "image" of San Francisco outside of our 49 square mile boundaries.

The other major event that shook the hospitality industry was the hotel workers' strike in the fall of 2024. UNITE-HERE Local 2 (my old union) represented thousands of hotel workers, who had been working without a contract for years.  At the same time many of the major hotel chains found themselves under new management and whose owners had names like LLC, Holdings Inc, and Investment Group.  These were no longer family-owned businesses, but Wall Street investors seeking an ROI, flushed with cash.

I spoke to one of the striking workers, who brought it home for me.  He said, "You've got these mostly Asian and Latina housekeepers, some in their 50s and 60s, who are barely five feet tall and maybe weigh a hundred pounds.  They have to lift king-sized mattresses, run vacuums, work with all kinds of chemicals, and repeat that six or seven times a day. While the their housekeeper supervisor says nothing to them except, ‘Go faster, you're behind schedule.’  Whatever they're are asking for is not enough."

November rolled around and voters decided to ditch the four candidates with decades of experience in city government, and go with multimillionaire political-neophyte Daniel Lurie, heir to the Levi's Jeans fortune.  He was able to convince voters to send him to city hall through a combination of guile, savoir-faire, oh and what was the other reason?  Hmmm. Oh, that's right, he outspent ALL of his opponents four-to-one, combined.  It also helped that his mom gave him a million dollars, as most moms do.

On day-one, Freshman mayor Daniel Lurie inherited a billion-dollar deficit, an administration in Washington D.C. who had their sights trained on San Francisco, the greatest income inequality in the nation (maybe even the world), and thousands of striking hotel workers.  With major conventions coming in 2025, and the NBA All-Star game coming in February, the eyes of the world would once again be upon us, and there was no way our new mayor would stand for images of LeBron James walking past striking hotel workers and their signs.

I don't know who he called, but the strike got settled pretty quickly.  I don't think he is a friend of labor as most of the major unions in the city supported other candidates. I suspect he called up his yacht club buddies and asked them to cut him some slack.

The parent companies of the hotels targeted by the union pretty much gave the striking workers just about everything they demanded.  When I asked my friend (the room service guy) if he was happy they got most everything they asked for, he was a bit jaundice on the subject.  He said, "The fact they settled so quickly, didn't mean we had won.  It meant what we were demanding was couch-cushion money for them, and they could have renegotiated the contact in good faith without a strike.  Instead, they dragged it out for almost four months just because they could.  They weren't crack negotiators; they were just being dicks.”

The city welcomed 2025, a new mayor, a new president, four new supervisors, and a lot of cautious optimism in hospitality.  The city managed to land some major conventions, and the NBA All Star Game in February.

In fact, between February 13th, and February 17th, the city had NBA All Star Game, The Chinese New Year’s Parade, Valentine’s Day, and the President’s Day three-day weekend.  All at the same time.  Some 350,000 people crossed out borders in what some were saying was the busiest, most high-profile weekend in the city since the pandemic.

In spite of that, those 350,000 visitors unfortunately strolled past the same empty storefronts around Fisherman’s Wharf, Union Square, and the Powell Street Corridor from five years ago.

But new mayor Daniel Lurie has a vision: to make San Francisco a destination for late night excursions.  However, even before the pandemic, San Francisco was notorious for rolling up the sidewalks by 10:00pm in the best of times.  After 2020, it is a near ghost town, even in what would pass as a late-night neighborhood like North Beach.  Good luck finding a bar open past 10:00pm, let alone by midnight.

Our new Mayor’s Gamble on Late-Night San Francisco

When plays end in our Theater District, and theater-goers file out into the street, their only dining options is a 7-11, a Jack-In-The-Box, and any hot dog carts that happen to be there.  That’s it!  Denny’s was the last of the restaurants in San Francisco open 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and they shut down in 2024.  As far as I can tell, San Francisco is the largest city in the United States that has no restaurants or supermarkets open 24/7.

It also doesn’t help that BART (our regional subway system) and most transit lines shut down before the bars close, so they should probably look at that before trying to sell ourselves as Las Vegas-lite.

I had drinks recently with a friend, who is a 25-year concierge veteran at one of the top hotels, and gave me great insight into what’s happening to the concierge profession.  She shared the local concierge association used to have hundreds of members before he pandemic, today it’s down to around forty. 

She also shared that concierge have been hit from all sides: Beginning with the Internet, then the post-pandemic-purge of concierge desks hotels engaged in, in race to the bottom line.  Lastly there is the average hotel guest, forced onto his phone in a Covid fervor as there were no live humans to interact with.  Sadly, that dynamic continued even after everything returned to “normal,” whatever that is. This honorable and noble profession still perseveres, and soldiers on in the face of multiple adversities.

So, what is the state of San Francisco hospitality in the Spring of 2025?  Let me be reassuring and noncommittal in my statement: It’s a mixed bag.  The SFCVB projects that conventions and special events will increase the number of visitors, but casual tourism will stay just that.  It is expected to hover around 23 million people, as it had in 2024 and 2023, well below the 26 million visitors who crossed our threshold in 2019.

A Vacant Storefront in San Francisco's Union Square in 2020

The Same Storefront in 2025

In a March 24th article, San Francisco Examiner staff writer, Patrick Hoge put it this way, “While meetings and business travel are projected to increase this year, however, leisure travel is not expected to see robust growth due to the strength of the U.S. dollar and geopolitical issues, according to the group. A relative bright spot has been the increase of large conventions and other events scheduled or having already occurred at Moscone Center.”

Here is my hospitality-veteran take on it all. The San Francisco Convention and Visitor’s Bureau operated a visitor center next to the Powell Street Cable Car Turnaround, and it has been closed since March of 2020.  By contrast the Hollywood visitor’s center, along the famous Hollywood Walk-of-Fame, is open.  I was in Duluth, Minnesota last year, and although they only keep summer hours, their visitor center was open!

By my estimation, if there is no central location where a visitor to the city can get basic tourist information (maps, brochures, advice from a human being), means San Francisco tourism has not fully recovered from the pandemic and not back to the normal we all remember.