Tourism leaders urge Newsom to bring back business events
A group of frustrated labor groups and tourism officials sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a letter this week demanding clarification as to when lucrative business conferences and corporate conventions would be allowed to return to California.
Those events were called off at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last year, and while other elements of travel and tourism have resumed, the group says the state hasn’t laid out a plan to bring back a vital source of revenue for hotels, restaurants, stores and the hospitality industry.
Business tourism in California accounted for $66 billion in spending per year and supported 457,000 jobs before the pandemic, the group says. As other states loosen restric
tions, some conventions and conferences previously held in California are moving elsewhere in 2022, the group claims.
“If we don’t act soon, many of these events and jobs will be lost forever,” reads the letter, sent March 3 and signed
by 134 businesses and officials.
Signatories include hotels, lodging and tourism associations, and convention centers.
San Francisco had already been losing conventions prior to the pandemic because of high hotel room rates and poor street conditions downtown. Apple, Google, Facebook and Oracle all moved conferences out of the city in recent years. The city’s tourist centers have been quiet during the pandemic, and overall tourism spending in the city is projected to drop by $10.7 billion in 2020 and 2021 combined, down from $10.2 billion in 2019.
Last year in California, 518,000 leisure and hospitality workers lost their jobs and overall tourism spending dropped by $86 billion following a 10year high of $145 billion in 2019.
Conventions and conferences account for 38% of overall tourism spending, according to the California Hotel and Lodging Association, and the industry is pushing for a speedy return in 2021.
“We’re confident that we’ve figured out ways to get smaller meetings and moderately sized meetings to a safe point,” said A.J. Rossitto, the California Hotel and Lodging Association’s legislative and communications coordinator. “We’re waiting on the goahead from the state that recognizes that.”