Visitors to San Francisco aren’t typically beating down the door of the Motel 6 Civic Center, which, despite its branding, is located squarely in the heart of Tenderloin. It has all the modern hospitality trappings: free Wi-Fi, flat-screen TVs, and a vinyl banner out front that advertises that it’s “now open.”
Although the sparse lobby decor leaves something to be desired, the hotel is completely booked for several days next week. So too is its sister location on the beach in the Outer Sunset.
You guessed it: Dreamforce is coming in T-minus five days and counting, and hotels in San Francisco have gone completely cuckoo.
The cheapest reservation available through aRes — the official booking partner of the conference, which runs Tuesday to Thursday — is nearly $500 a night for a standard room at a Holiday Inn near the Oakland airport, along the event’s shuttle route. As of Wednesday, roughly 60 hotels on the aRes site were sold out for the conference dates.
Those looking for luxury still have options, although they’ll need to open up their checkbooks. The St. Regis is charging nearly $5,000 a night for its few remaining rooms and up to $9,000 a night for a one-bedroom suite with butler service. Also available: the Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons on Market Street, which spans 2,300 square feet over two floors but has just one bedroom. It is going for nearly $20,000 a night, about $5,000 more than a midweek stay the following week.
The prices are high, and so are the stakes for the city’s still-recovering hospitality industry. Last year, Salesforce’s flagship event brought San Francisco $130 million in revenue, the company says, an increase of nearly 40% over 2023’s numbers.
Salesforce started its partnership with aRes two years ago to ensure that even last-minute attendees would have a place to stay while in town to schmooze, see celebrity speakers, and perhaps even learn a thing or two about the intricacies of customer relationship management software.
This year’s speaker list includes the CEOs of Google, Waymo, and Starbucks, plus A-list actors like America Ferrera, Jesse Eisenberg, and, of course, Salesforce pitchman Matthew McConaughey. Metallica and Benson Boone are slated to perform Wednesday night to raise funds for Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s namesake children’s hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland.
Dreamforce is San Francisco’s largest corporate conference, with 45,000 attendees expected. By comparison, Microsoft Ignite, which will come to Moscone for the first time the week after Dreamforce, had about 14,000 attendees last year in Chicago.
Benioff had threatened to pull Dreamforce from his hometown if the city didn’t clean up downtown in the aftermath of the pandemic. Though the conference has now been confirmed to stay in San Francisco through 2027, a departure would have been disastrous.
“Dreamforce is one of our largest conventions of the year, bringing thousands of attendees from around the world and providing a significant boost to our hotels, restaurants, and attractions,” SF Travel President and CEO Anna Marie Presutti said in a statement.
Airbnb as a budget alternative
Dreamforce’s return has turned San Francisco’s lodging market into a gold rush. With even budget hotels charging nearly $500 a night, short-term rental hosts are cashing in on the overflow.
Peter Kwan rents out a room in his North Beach home on Airbnb, and even with a 50% premium on his normal rate, he had a taker for the entirety of the conference by the end of June. Kwan heads the city’s Home Sharers Democratic Club, a community support group for short-term rental hosts, and said almost all the members he’s talked to on the subject lifted their rents by a similar amount.
Most Dreamforce attendees are reimbursed by their companies for their accommodations, and Kwan said any employer would be “overjoyed” to pay his upcharge rather than a hotel’s. While his rate went from the usual $150 to about $220 for Dreamforce, the nearby Marriott in Fisherman’s Wharf, which is typically less than $200 a night, is charging $1,400.
Hosts set their own prices, according to an Airbnb spokesperson, and prices can range for big events, but the average San Francisco Airbnb booked during Dreamforce 2025 is approximately $410 per night — less than any hotel currently available through aRes.
Hosts are thrilled to see business travelers back after the pandemic shutdown decimated the city’s conference calendar for several years. And conference attendees are good customers, because they are busy outside the rental, Kwan said.
“They leave a very light footprint,” he said. “They’re out all day, and they just come back and sleep and have a shower in the morning, and that’s it.”
There are fewer short-term rentals for the conference this year, Kwan said, as the city’s $925, two-year host application fee — with no guarantee of approval — has priced out casual operators who want to rent only for big events like Dreamforce.
“Everybody’s shocked by how expensive the permit application fee is, and it’s having an effect on the number of new applicants,” he said.
Meanwhile, labor unions and San Francisco officials are calling for a boycott of Airbnb over its lawsuit against the city, which claims the company overpaid on business taxes.
Even before the boycott, short-term rental hosts were “scapegoated” for contributing to the city’s affordable housing crisis, Kwan said. About 60% of California hosts use the additional income to keep their own housing affordable and cover the rising costs of living, according to Airbnb.
“When it comes to being part of the local tourism economy, which is a very important economy for San Francisco, I think we’re part of the solution,” Kwan said.