There’s good news and bad news for the San Francisco convention scene.
On a positive note, the San Francisco Travel Association is reporting a significant uptick in convention bookings, with 30 events confirmed at Moscone Center in 2025, including HubSpot’s Inbound 2025, Dreamforce, and, for the first time, Microsoft’s Ignite conference.
Significantly, the hotel room-nights generated by Moscone events in 2025 are expected to be 59 percent greater than this year: 659,700 room nights compared to 400,000. The new-to-the-city Microsoft conference alone is forecasted to need 61,510 hotel rooms for the IT developers and decision-makers who attend.
However, the upbeat booking news is tempered by growing labor disputes between hotel workers and some of the city’s biggest properties.
About 500 workers from the 1,500-room San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel, just a block from Moscone Center, went on strike on November 24. They join some 2,000 workers already on strike at Grand Hyatt San Francisco, Marriott Union Square, Palace Hotel, Westin St. Francis, and the city’s largest hotel, the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square.
The housekeepers, bellhops, cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders, and other hotel workers represented by Unite Here Local 2 are picketing for better wages, affordable health care, and the restoration of jobs cut made during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their contracts expired at the end of August and the first hotel strikes began September 22.
All properties have remained open during the union actions.
Still more hotel workers might be headed to the picket lines. On November 21, union employees of the St. Regis San Francisco and W San Francisco voted to authorize strikes. An authorization means that the union’s negotiating committee can call a strike at any time.
