Scott Beck, president and CEO of San Francisco Travel Association, abruptly resigned his position after only seven months on the job, citing personal reasons.
San Francisco Travel Association announced that Anna Marie Presutti, vice president and general manager of the city’s Hotel Nikko, was appointed interim president and CEO.
San Francisco Travel Association released the following statement from Presutti:
“San Francisco Travel will continue to be the champion of hospitality for all those who want to visit, enjoy, dine and work in one of the world’s best cities. Our board will conduct a search for a new CEO who embodies the spirit of San Francisco, is a skillful manager of a great team and is experienced in attracting conventions, business travelers and tourists to great cities.”
Beck succeeded then-president Joe D’Alessandro October 30. D’Alessandro retired in December after nearly 18 years at the helm of San Francisco’s official destination marketing organization, one of the country’s largest membership-based tourism promotion organizations.
Interviewed by Meetings Today in April, Beck was bullish on the future of San Francisco, which has struggled greatly in the post-pandemic environment, with shuttered downtown commercial space, major convention hotels that have walked away from their mortgage obligations and a homelessness and fentanyl crisis resulting in a dramatic drop in convention business.
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“The perceptions that are sort of the ether right now, while not entirely without some connection to reality, are really overblown in terms of what the experience is—this is not a zombie apocalypse, a monolithic experience here,” Beck said at the time. “We are feeling the effects of two years of almost an inability to have any sort of sales effort.”
Presutti has served as San Francisco Travel’s board chair and will assume her interim CEO role immediately. John Anderson, general manager of the San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel, who is the San Francisco Travel chair-elect, has become San Francisco Travel’s chair.
According to statistics released in April, San Francisco was starting to make strides, registering more than 618,000 nights in 2023 after a 2022 that saw only 338,549 actualized, but sill a far cry from the nearly 968,000 actualized in 2019.
“’25 and ’26 look so much better than ’24, and our lead volume is on par with 2022 and just slightly behind 2019 in terms of our citywide business,” Beck said in the April interview. “So, I’m feeling optimistic.”
Prior to his role in San Francisco, Beck served as president and CEO of Destination Toronto, joining the DMO in 2019 to lead the sales and marketing efforts for Canada’s most-visited destination and North America’s fourth-largest city. Before joining Destination Toronto, Beck served as president and CEO of Visit Salt Lake for 14 years.
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