I guess needle-strewn streets and Greta Thunberg murals are not the tourist draws that one would expect!
Citing dirty streets and high hotel costs, Oracle has decided to move its important annual conference from San Francisco.
It’s new venue will be in Las Vegas in a 3-year deal.
According to an email that the San Francisco Travel Association (SFTA) sent to its members on Monday, Oracle has signed a three-year agreement to bring its flagship event to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas.“Oracle stated that their attendee feedback was that San Francisco hotel rates are too high,” the email, which was viewed by CNBC, said. “Poor street conditions was another reason why they made this difficult decision.”
The SFTA estimates the total loss of $64,000,000 a year to the local economy due to this decision. Oracle’s event is the second major conference that has relocated due to public health concerns.
In 2018, a medical association also pulled its convention.”The doctors group told the San Francisco delegation that while they loved the city, postconvention surveys showed their members were afraid to walk amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness that are common on the streets,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.Last year, a UC Berkeley researcher found that some parts of San Francisco were “more unsanitary than many of the dwellings in impoverished, developing countries.” A survey of 158 city blocks encountered more than 300 piles of feces and 100-plus improperly discarded needles.
The hotel costs were also a consideration in ending the nearly 2-decade run of OracleWorld in San Francisco.
The event attracts more than 60,000 Oracle customers and partners and gives the company a chance to show off its latest technologies. In recent years, the event has been trumped by Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual conference, which claims over 170,000 attendees.Both events are known for shutting down a large swath of downtown San Francisco, around the Moscone Center, wreaking havoc on the city’s already congested streets. And as tech companies have started congregating in San Francisco, rather than further south in Silicon Valley, prices have skyrocketed.According to a survey published in October by Cheaphotels.org, San Francisco is the fourth most expensive city for hotels, behind Nashville, Boston and San Jose. The average double room at San Francisco’s cheapest hotel with at least three stars was $214 in October, the survey showed. Las Vegas was all the way at the other end of the spectrum.
Of course, none of this comes as a surprise to those of us who have watched California descend into the level below third-world existence.
It might be nice of the city has political representation focused on its public health needs.
Truly, this move by Oracle may be a sign of things to come.
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