San Francisco Loses Another Meeting

By Margo McCall -- Tradeshow Week, 3/14/2005

As San Francisco's hotel labor dispute drags into a sixth month, the city has lost another piece of meetings business. But this time the group isn't going out of state. Rather, it's relocating just a matter of miles south to San Jose, Calif.

The Organization of American Historians decided earlier this month to hold its 2,500-attendee annual meeting at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center March 31–April 3, instead of the San Francisco Hilton during the same dates.

And that has caused San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau officials to accuse San Jose of poaching. "I clearly realize it's a competitive environment out there, and every city needs to do what it has to do to capture convention business, but when it's aggressively reaching out to signed business and painting a picture that isn't true, I don't think that's ethical," said Mark Theis, vice president of the CVB's convention division.

But one city's poaching is another's aggressive marketing. Dan Fenton, president and CEO of the San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau, said his city would be remiss if it didn't reach out to groups that are considering moving their meetings because of the ongoing boycott by Unite Here members who work for 14 downtown San Francisco hotels.

"We certainly didn't create the labor dispute," said Fenton. "Some of the groups are feeling uncomfortable. Once we understand that they have a constituency that feels that way, we wouldn't be doing our job if we didn't mention there's a place 40 minutes south. Any aggressive sales and marketing organization would certainly not have a problem with contacting a group that's uncomfortable about holding their meeting there."

Although Unite Here members in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., also voted last September to authorize a strike, San Francisco — where 8,000 workers are affected — has become a center of the dispute. It was there that workers in October launched a two-week strike at four hotels and were quickly locked out for weeks at all 14 hotels. A 60-day cooling-off period came and went without much progress in talks between workers and hotel management.

In the meantime, a new contract was signed in Washington, D.C. A boycott is also in force in Los Angeles, but there are no reports of lost convention business there.

San Francisco union members have been urging meeting planners to boycott affected hotels, a strategy decried by the American Society of Assn. Executives, Meeting Professionals Intl. and the Professional Convention Management Assn.

Amy Stark, director of meetings for the Organization of American Historians, said her group contacted San Jose as a possible backup site last fall, when the labor dispute was just heating up. The board met and considered the financial ramifications when the cooling-off period expired with no resolution in sight. A survey of members found that three-quarters of those who responded were uncomfortable with the idea of staying in a hotel under union boycott.

That sealed the relocation decision.

"After that message, we knew our meeting was starting to fall apart. We were losing registrants. Financially, we couldn't afford to keep going" with plans for San Francisco, Stark said.

Relocating the meeting won't come without a cost, however. The organization is still negotiating with the Hilton over hundreds of thousands of dollars it is contractually obligated to pay at this point. And although the historians group is going to San Jose this year, it's not eliminating San Francisco from its rotation, which also includes Minneapolis, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C. San Francisco, where the group met in 1997, tends to generate strong turnout. "Our members really like it," Stark said.

The historians group was the second major meeting to defect due to the labor strife. In November, the American Anthropological Assn. moved its 5,000-attendee meeting from the San Francisco Hilton to the Atlanta Hilton. Theis said San Francisco also recently lost out to another city on a bid to draw the Modern Language Assn.'s meeting.

"Luckily, San Francisco still continues to anchor major convention groups," he said. "It just creates a little negativity."

One major difference between San Jose and San Francisco is the makeup of their CVB boards. While Theis said the San Francisco CVB "tries to take an apolitical stand" when its board is assembled, the San Jose CVB last year became part of Team San Jose, formed to include all community stakeholders, including hotel management and organized labor.

Six of Team San Jose's 27 board members represent the labor industry. Formed as a public benefit corporation, Team San Jose is intended to enlist the support of diverse groups to market the community. Fenton, who is also chairman of Team San Jose, believes that having both labor and hotel management on the board reduces the likelihood of labor strife in his city.

While organized labor representatives are CVB members in San Francisco, Theis said having union representatives on the CVB board would represent a conflict of interest. "We're not taking sides in the labor dispute," he said. "We're just taking a side when we're losing business."