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San Francisco's luxury hotel building explosion could fizzle unless Moscone Convention Center is expanded more than currently planned, local hoteliers predict.
"Unfortunately, there may be too many hotels opening at one time, and we have a Moscone Center that is far too small to supply all of the new rooms," says Marcel van Aelst, general manager of the 402-room Mark Hopkins Intercontinental in San Francisco.
"I think the glut is here," says John Pritzker, general manager of the 800-room Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, "and a major problem is that Moscone is underspaced. Consequently, we have as many rooms as other cities, but not enough convention space to accommodate it all."
The city's 23,000 hotel rooms will increase by 5,641 new rooms if all proposals now on the drawing board are completed over the next five years. Over the next three years alone, analysts expect the supply of hotel rooms to increase by 6 percent while demand grows by only 2 percent. As a result, occupancy levels will probably drop to 60 percent from the current 72 percent.
To boost convention traffic to the city, San Francisco's Redevelopment Agency has already planned to construct 50,000 net square feet of meeting...