To see the sorry state of San Francisco’s once dynamic hospitality industry right now, just pay a visit to the lobby of the Hotel Nikko near Union Square — you’ll need to ring a bell to get in, and when you step into the lobby, it’s empty.
A year ago, the lobby would have been buzzing with tourists, business travelers and conventioneers. Today, the 530-room hotel is lucky to have 30 guests.
A year ago, the hotel hallways bustled with 35 to 55 housekeepers cleaning rooms. Today, there are two.
Downstairs in the hotel’s kitchen, where 100 cooks and workers once served up meals for guests and banquets, a single cook waits for room service orders.
Besides empty hotels, the few tourists who come to the city find there’s not much here.
“The other day we had a couple who had booked a tour of Alcatraz, which they were told was ‘open.’ The island was open, but the main attraction, the prison, was closed. They were fuming,” Hotel Nikko General Manager Anna Marie Presutti said. “I wanted to offer them a free meal as consolation, but our restaurant is closed.”
It’s much the same story a few blocks away at the JW Marriott, where only about 20% of the 344 rooms are occupied.
“At the beginning of the pandemic we were housing medical staff from the hospitals, but that ended recently,” General Manager John Anderson said.
Hotel Council of San Francisco CEO Kevin Carroll estimates that only half of the city’s 215 hotels are even open. And those that are open were only about one-third full in October.
Ted Egan, chief economist with the San Francisco Controller’s Office, estimated that, pre-pandemic — as in 2019 — the leisure and hospitality industry, which includes hotel, convention and restaurant workers, employed 101,983 people, 13% of all jobs in the city.
And the city’s hotel tax brought in $252 million in revenue in the 2019-20 fiscal year. Projections for 2020-21 are for only $82.8 million.
Worse yet, an updated controller’s report released this month predicted it could take up to six years for the tourism industry to recover to pre-pandemic levels. The report’s scenario assumes a vaccine is available in the spring, with widespread adoption by December 2021.
Early on, the Nikko got a boost in room sales when it hosted baseball teams in town to play the Giants and the Oakland A’s. But with the shortened season over, these days the most reliable guests are international flight crews in town on layovers.
“I like the quiet,” TAP Air Portugal flight attendant Sandra Conha said. “And we were the only ones in the gym, but it is strange that it is so empty,”
Not that there’s a lot to do outside either.
With so much closed, Conha and her fellow attendant Vera Pereira spent one of their layover days walking to the Golden Gate Bridge and back.
Now many of the flight crews are disappearing as international flights to San Francisco continue to dwindle.
And while tourism and conventions are the most visible part of the hotel business, the real financial heart of the industry is the smaller business and group meetings of 25 to 200 people who all stay, meet and eat at the same hotel.
“It’s our lifeblood.” Anderson said.
Hotels believe they can hold the meetings safely with proper distancing, but such gatherings are banned under statewide guidelines.
“And there do not appear to be any changes on the horizon,” Anderson said.
In the meantime, the JW Marriott has donated some of its meeting space to be used in partnership with the city as a learning hub for children living in the Tenderloin.
And it’s not just hotels feeling the pain as the holiday season approaches.
This time last year, the Nikko was paying local florists $60,000 to deck out the hotel and lobby with flowers. This year the only lobby decorations are three plastic trees from Overstock.com.
“We’ll be doing the decorating ourselves,” Presutti said.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Phil Matier appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KGO-TV morning and evening news and can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call 415-777-8815, or email pmatier@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @philmatier
The Link LonkNovember 22, 2020 at 07:00PM
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-Francisco-s-empty-hotels-have-little-to-15744129.php
San Francisco’s empty hotels have little to celebrate during coming holidays - San Francisco Chronicle
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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