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.