[keerthiko]

One can argue conferences and conventions and business travel is still tourism, but not the kind that comes to appreciate the city, people, culture or history. SF will remain a destination for the starry-eyed tech grad and entrepreneur despite everything, that is not what I am commenting to here.

As for total spending, 2.3% is not even inflation in a normal place, let alone the most rapidly inflating city in the world. If you adjust for 2017 vs 2018 dollars, that is definitely a decline. By my estimate the cost of most things a visitor would spend on has gone up by at least 5% on average between those years (as the report you link posted, hotels up by 6%, and airbnbs up by far more than that, and similarly with ticketed entries, transportation and food).

This report paints a far rosier picture than what is actually happening when you account for the rate at which prices of things tourists pay for are going up relative to the tourism revenue numbers themselves.

More viscerally, if you live in SF for 2-3 years and hang around tourist spots often enough, you can just feel this viscerally as the lines outside shops have shrunk, numerous shopkeeps are just dusting their shelves with no customers, and gifts look unpurchased for years.

[csomar]

Inflation for 2018 was 1.9% in the US. So that's still above inflation but also the number of visitors have increased. You should also probably take into account that the city is saturated and thus there isn't any room for growth. (which kinda of the equivalent of the city costs inflating more than the average city in the US).

> you can just feel this viscerally as the lines outside shops have shrunk, numerous shopkeeps are just dusting their shelves with no customers, and gifts look unpurchased for years.

Or maybe consumers are changing their behaviors for lack of a better word. It never made sense to me, why, as a tourist I should go shop through the city stores. The brands are the same back home, the prices are x2 what you pay in Amazon and the logistics are not that great (flight/taxis/trains/bags/etc...)

I don't think tourism is dying in SF or any city in the world (Tourism growth is so strong that even if you are a sucker-city you'll still beat records) but there is little value-added in these shops that tourists will stop and drop $$ at them.