Coronavirus: How Canceled Conferences Are Impacting Local Businesses

The kitchen staff at Left Coast Catering, a small San Francisco food preparer, had been busily cooking for a large Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) conference at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, scheduled for last week.

But just days before the start of the conference, as coronavirus fears intensified, BCBS canceled the event, leaving business owner Laurine Wickett stuck with $7,000 worth of crudités in her commercial fridges. She ended up donating the unused food to a local nonprofit that delivers food to local shelters and food pantries.

In fact, Wickett has been fielding cancellation calls all week. In her 25 years on the job, she said she's never seen business drop so fast.

“I don’t see any new inquiries coming in because of this fear, so there’s basically nothing in the pipeline for the next foreseeable future.” she said. “I’m looking at almost five to six months that I’m going to have to get myself through. And we’re just going to have to get our team down to bare bones.”

Wickett said she has managed to weather major economic slowdowns, like the dot-com bubble crash of the early 2000s and the Great Recession, when there were still always plenty of weddings and bar mitzvahs to work.

“But this is completely different, where people are panicking and we’re dealing with fear,” she said. “And you really can’t measure or predict this.”

Wickett is hardly alone. Businesses across the Bay Area are just beginning to feel the pain, as a host of events and conferences throughout the region are being canceled or rescheduled in an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

There have been 10 large conference cancellations at San Francisco's Moscone Center, including Google I/O, the Facebook Developer Conference and the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Some events, like GDC, have recently announced plans to proceed online — good news for attendees, but little consolation to vendors.

The canceled events at Moscone alone amount to nearly $179 million in lost revenue, according to the venue.

Every year, spending on meetings and conventions in San Francisco amounts to almost $2 billion, roughly 19% of total tourism spending in the city, according to the San Francisco Travel Association. In other words, an ongoing surge in cancellations would significantly impact the economy of the city and the region.

And related losses aren't likely to be covered by insurance, say insurance brokers and risk analysts like Gisele Norris with the firm Aon.

“It’s something insurers would say, ‘If we cover that, it’ll bankrupt us.’ Because everyone is going to have that loss at the same time,” Norris said.

Norris said the coronavirus outbreak is affecting the world economy much differently than other recent health scares, like H1N1 or the Zika virus, because it’s impacting more people in the United States and other wealthy nations.

While businesses can purchase insurance that covers event cancellations due to communicable diseases, like the coronavirus — and many did just that after the H1N1 scare in 2009 — any policies that were opened within the last month are likely to specifically exclude COVID-19 instances.

And among insurance policies that do include communicable diseases, most only cover losses if an event was explicitly canceled by order of public health officials, rather than at the discretion of the event organizers.

But even in light of those potential losses, Norris said, a growing number of event organizers see cancellation as the most prudent option, both in terms of safety and financial security.

“Event organizers may be concerned about their own liability should their venue be a breeding ground for infectious disease,” Norris said.