The San Francisco Travel Association reported that San Francisco welcomed 18.01 million visitors in 2014, an increase of 6.5 percent from 2013. These visitors spent US$10.67 billion in 2014, up 13.7 percent from the previous year. The data was presented during the 10th annual Visitor Industry Outlook & Marketing Conference recently.
“The growth of San Francisco’s visitor industry continued to break records in 2014. Both visitor spending and the total number of visitors have reached the highest levels ever,” said Joe D’Alessandro, President and CEO, San Francisco Travel.
In 2014, there was an average of 150,412 visitors in San Francisco each day. Visitor spending equated to US$29.23 million daily (including spending related to meetings and conventions). San Francisco Travel also reported that 130,000 people stayed in peer-to-peer lodging such as Airbnb. Cruise ships saw 260,000 passengers embark and debark in San Francisco. These market segments had not been tracked previously.
In 2014, San Francisco Travel booked 41 conventions at Moscone Center, which will fill 939,115 hotel room nights between 2014 and 2029. Their attendees and exhibitors will spend an estimated US$679,172,475.
“While domestic leisure, business and convention travel continue to expand, most of the industry’s growth in recent years has been in the international sector. Since 2009, international visitor spending in San Francisco has grown 71 percent. In the same time frame, domestic spending grew 25 percent. We estimate that San Francisco had 4.1 million international visitors in 2014, about 31 percent of our visitors from outside the Bay Area (or 22.8 percent of all visitors). They spent $3.4 billion, or 34 percent of the total spent by all visitors,” D’Alessandro added.
