San Francisco Travel Names Its First Female CEO

Skift Take

San Francisco is still far from seeing a full recovery in its conferences and meetings business. Hiring a permanent CEO for its destination marketing organization is an important step.

Dawit Habtemariam and Andrea Doyle, Skift

San Francisco Travel Association, the official destination marketing organization for the city and county, has named Anna Marie Presutti as its president and CEO – the first female to lead the organization.

Presutti took over on an interim basis in May after the abrupt resignation of Scott Beck, who left after only seven months on the job, citing ‘personal reasons.’ Beck had replaced Joe D’Alessandro, who held the role for 18 years.

Presutti said she aims to bring large-scale events and conferences back to the city. “My priority is to lean into the momentum building and return our convention business to a healthy level,” she said in a statement. “We will invest in marketing San Francisco’s great strengths, including its culinary scene and arts and culture, and collaborate with other organizations, such as the Bay Area Host Committee, to bring more world-class events here.”

Since the pandemic, San Francisco’s reputation as a meetings and conference host has struggled to make a full comeback due to the slow recovery of business travel and rise of remote and hybrid work, which hurt vibrancy and foot traffic downtown, Beck told Skift in February.

Last month, Presutti told the Wall Street Journal 2024 “is definitely a difficult year” and the city’s conference business likely won’t recover until 2028 or 2029.

Signs of Improvement

The city got some good news last week. On the third and final day of Dreamforce, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he signed a new agreement to keep the mega-conference in San Francisco for three more years. 

San Francisco has also seen improvement in its occupancy rates, thanks in part to its rise as an AI tech epicenter. The city recently hosted a conference on AI organized by Databricks, which pushed its hotel occupancy rate to 79% between June 9 and June 15, making it the top hotel market for that week.

The city has been taking steps to address downtown safety concerns. ”You’re not seeing the crime and the open-air drug markets like you did a year ago,” Dylan David, founder of Dylan’s Tours and San Francisco native, told Skift in June.

In 2023, the city had 23.1 million visitors, a 5.2% rise from 2022, according to San Francisco Travel. Total 2023 visitor-related spending, including $494.6 million in meeting planner and exhibitor spending, increased by 20% to $9.3 billion.

In 2023, tourism accounted for $9.3 billion in total visitor spending and generated nearly $610 million in tax revenues, according to the San Francisco Travel Association.

Presutti joins several other women CEOs who head up CVBs. They include Martha Sheridan, president and CEO of Meet Boston; Kristen Adamo, president and CEO of Providence Warwick CVB; Casandra Matej, president and CEO of Visit Orlando; Julie Calvert, president and CEO of Visit Cincy; and Tammy Canavan, president and CEO of Visit Seattle. San Diego Tourism Authority is headed up by Julie Coker.