The good news at a conference hosted Tuesday by the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, as one keen observer put it, is that February is almost over - so we're making progress at putting 2009 behind us.

The Northern California Visitor Outlook Conference was the fourth of its kind, its tone diverging remarkably from three previous years of upbeat forecasts. The gathering was offered as a reality check for an industry feeling the consequences of a take-no-prisoners recession.

During this rocky patch, "It's all about reducing cost," Jeff Eastman, the chief executive officer of the TAP Report (Trends Analysis Projections), a consulting group in Kansas City, told those gathered at the San Francisco Hilton. "Is the business you have on the books real? Is it going to hold? Are the corporate cancellations done yet? It's just scary. Nobody really knows where it is going to end up," Eastman said.

Visitors to California spent $96.7 million in 2007, and while the 2008 final figure is not yet in, it is expected to be roughly the same, said Dan Mishell, research director of the nonprofit California Travel & Tourism Commission, which seeks to plant the image of California in minds of potential visitors across the country.

The usually glass-is-half-full commission anticipates there will be a decline of 8 percent in tourist spending in 2009, said Mishell.

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Tom Callahan, the co-president and chief executive officer of the San Francisco office of PKF Consulting, a hotel consultancy, said he expects revenue per available room among the 44,000 hotels rooms in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties will be down 10.3 percent in 2009.

Joe D'Alessandro, president and chief executive officer of the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, said of 2009, "There are so many unknowns about where consumer confidence will be, about what international travel will be like this summer, about business travel and corporate travel."

He said the single bright spot is San Francisco's convention calendar this year - although there have been two cancellations.

San Jose's Cisco Systems scrapped a session that would have brought in 52,000 people, said D'Alessandro, who said the cancellation was done for business reasons. A Cisco representative did not respond to a message seeking comment. The second cancellation was for a meeting to be hosted by NetApp, a Sunnyvale storage and data management company, that D'Alessandro said was to draw 15,000 people. Elisa Steele, senior vice president of marketing at NetApp, said there was more customer interest than was anticipated, but she added, "Those same customers told us their travel budgets were being cut and it was difficult to commit in today's climate of economic uncertainty."

D'Alessandro said there were 992,000 room nights from 2008 conventions in San Francisco, meaning a hotel night booked by a convention delegate. Thus far this year, there are 830,000 room nights booked, according to the bureau.

San Francisco has averaged about 900,000 room nights for each of the past five years, said D'Alessandro, "and for that reason we are encouraged."

San Francisco's visitor mix is roughly 40 percent leisure traveler, 33 percent meeting- and convention-goers and the rest a blend of transient business travelers.

Business travelers are "possibly the one we are most worried about," said D'Alessandro, "because there is no way to stimulate that. Companies will travel or they won't."