Thursday's How Waymo and Covid Changed San Francisco Hospitality Forever

Even though it has been six years San Francisco tourism and hospitality has not fully recovered. Despite what Mayor Daniel Lurie proclaims, and the statistics SFTravel (San Francisco's visitor and convention bureau) sites, San Francisco is still a long way from its golden year of 2019. That was when the Tech Boom was booming, and the city welcomed a whopping 26 million visitors.

However, if you take a walk along what was the city's tourist Mecca, Powell Street to Union Square, most of the storefronts still sit empty. The city's visitor center remains closed while its counterpart in Los Angeles has been operating for years. It's easier to show an increase in occupancy rates since Covid when there are fewer hotels than there were in 2019.

When I was a concierge at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel (now the Beacon Grand) I had the honor and privilege of working the legendary doorman, Tom Sweeney. After 43 years he retired in January of 2020, just a few months before Covid shut down every hotel worldwide and overnight.

The life blood of a doorman is cash. Cash from grateful hotel guests as well as cash from taxi and airport shuttles. I went to see Tom on his last day in January of 2020 to wish him farewell with his well-earned retirement. We had a nice conversation about the old days, but then he said something rather prophetic. He revealed that people now take Ubers and Lyfts, so there are no more airport shuttles to earn a commission from.

The taxi industry became a flimsy husk of its former self, and the Uber and Lyft logos are now far more prevalent than a lighted Off-Duty taxi sign. Ride-share drivers don't need to curry favor or build a relationship with hotel doormen. They go where the algorithm sends them, not necessarily where the money is. Now that AVs (autonomous vehicles) like Waymo and Zoox are supplanting ride-shares, there's not even a human driver to negotiate with.

Another challenge Tom shared with me was that more hotel guests do not have cash on them and use Apple Pay, or some other online form of payment. This new habit meant hotel guests were less likely to carry cash on them.  The practice of shaking a doorman's hand with a folded up $20 bill in your palm is sadly becoming a thing of the past.  That subtle interaction can't be recreated with an iPhone and Venmo.  

The other sad development in hospitality is what I call the demise of professional hospitality class.   Before the pandemic, it was not beyond the realm of reason to meet professional waiters in Michelin-star restaurants or front desk agents in five-star hotels, who made it their profession.  It wasn't a caretaker job to something better.  That was your job, and one you worked hard at getting. 

Once the hotels and fine dining reopened, the professional class were called back to their respective positions, with one caveat: For too many they were not going to get their old shifts and wages.  What this meant for many in the industry was that if you were a senior front desk agent with two decades of experience at the same hotel, you had to reapply as if you were a first-time applicant.  For some, this was an insult, and many moved on to other professions.

As a result, top hotels and restaurants reopened but had to scramble to find someone to fill those positions their career veterans walked away from.  Many janitors and barbacks were pressed into service for positions they were not qualified or prepared for.  Those former busboys now had to become sommeliers.  Some elite hotels and restaurants even went so far as to hire anyone, with little regard for their experience.

I went to the grand reopening of a five-star hotel on Nob Hill, which had been closed since the pandemic hit six years earlier.  This was a big deal, the last of the five-star hotels to open since Covid shuttered them all.  This is the kind of hotel that hires from within the hospitality community, so as to be sure of the applicant's experience with working in high-end properties.  

I struck up a conversation with the doorman, whom I assumed was a veteran of the profession.  To my jaw-dropping surprise I learned that not only was this his first time working in a hotel, but it was his first day!   I assumed that since this was such an august position, one usually reserved for veterans of the profession, that he must have at least found it through word-of-mouth. 

Not even close.  He used to be a graphic designer and saw a job listing on Glass Door, the employment website.

This elite five-star property, the kind that movie stars and royalty reside, basically went to an employment website and said, "Who wants a job!"  They hired someone who is the first impression guests see when they arrive, and what this informed me of was a sad realization.  The days of valuing the experience of a career concierge or maître d' were over.  

It says a lot that a hotel of that caliber would start a doorman, with no prior training or hospitality experience, on the first day of their grand reopening.   It also informed me that what were once honorable and noble hospitality professions, ones that took years to properly master and ones you could only find through word-of-mouth insider connections, are today just another line in a scroll of job postings on Craig's List.