S.F. event halted:
Facebook is canceling its Global Marketing Summit next month at Moscone Center “out of an abundance of caution” as the coronavirus spreads. Other events are still on the schedule, with special cleaning planned.
Facebook will cancel its Global Marketing Summit slated to take place in in San Francisco next month because of coronavirus concerns.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we canceled our Global Marketing Summit due to evolving public health risks related to coronavirus,” Anthony Harrison, a Facebook spokesman, said by email.
Facebook is committed to holding the event in San Francisco in future years, said San Francisco Travel spokeswoman Laurie Armstrong Gossy.
“Facebook has assured us that it is not related to San Francisco specifically and we look forward to welcoming them back in 2021, 2022 and beyond,” Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of San Francisco Travel said in a statement.
Scheduled for March 912 at the Moscone Center, the event typically brings about $11 million in spending to the city, according to Gossy, who said approximately 5,000 attendees who were expected to stay at 10 hotels.
It is not yet clear if Facebook will still have to pay the Moscone Center for the cost of the
conference given the lastminute cancellation, according to Bob Sauter, the venue’s general manager. “We are going to negotiate those questions with them in the spirit of the fact that they are a great client and are great for San Francisco,” Sauter said of Facebook.
Though headquartered in Menlo Park, Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary have big offices downtown and are among the city’s largest employers.
Sauter said Moscone Center had implemented its highest level of cleaning procedures including using electrostatic disinfecting sprayers and wiping down “touch points” like elevator buttons, railings, light switches and the like.
Other tech conferences worldwide are being canceled over coronavirus concerns, the largest of which is the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The annual event normally draws over 100,000 participants, with participating Bay Area companies including Facebook, Google, Intel, Cisco, HPE and Nvidia, several of which had announced they were pulling out prior to the event’s cancellation.
In San Francisco, the RSA cybersecurity conference faced the loss of IBM, a major spon
“Out of an abundance of caution, we canceled our Global Marketing Summit.”
Anthony Harrison of Facebook
sor, which announced Friday it would not send employees to the event. Organizers said on the RSA website that the event, set to be held this month at the Moscone Center, would proceed as scheduled.
The Game Developers Conference, planned for March 1620 at the convention center, is also going ahead, but without Chinese participants. The video game conference’s organizers said on its website that about 2% of planned attendees were from China and they were affected by the administration’s temporary ban on foreign nationals who have been in that country within the past 14 days. Organizers of the game conference and the RSA event noted the Moscone Center’s plans to step up cleaning and disinfecting.
Sauter said he has been in regular contact with organizers of events booked through March to address coronavirus concerns, and he does not expect further cancellations.
For those willing to travel, finding flights has been a challenge.
China Southern’s last scheduled nonstop from Guangzhou arrived at SFO on Friday, with the plane returning that same evening. All other airlines had previously canceled flights between the airport and mainland China, and most carriers have cut or reduced flights to Hong Kong. Even Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s flagship airline, has slashed its February SFO to Hong Kong schedule from 21 flights per week to 14, according to airport spokesman Doug Yakel. United has extended its China flight cancellations into April.
The flight reductions have hurt the airport, which gets revenue from landing fees paid for each plane, and also airport shops, which are feeling the loss of Chinese visitors.