By Bob Sechler
Austin American-Statesman
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) As Bob Sechler reports, “The cancellation of SXSW comes in the wake of decisions by dozens of scheduled participants and companies to bail on the event in recent days, including high-profile names like NBC Universal, Apple, Netflix, Twitter and Intel.”
AUSTIN, Texas
The South by Southwest festival, an iconic Austin event that attracts more than 100,000 music fans, technology buffs and pop culture enthusiasts to the city’s downtown each March, has been called off this year amid growing global fears about a possible coronavirus pandemic.
The city of Austin declared a local disaster Friday that will prevent the event from taking place, Austin Mayor Steve Adler said at a news conference, even though there have been no confirmed cases of the virus in the Austin area.
The cancellation, just seven days before the 2020 festival was scheduled to start next Friday, comes as SXSW organizers faced public pressure to scrap it, as well the prospect of a substantially diminished event anyway because a lengthy list of companies and speakers already dropped out.
Officials of SXSW, a private company, described themselves as devastated by the development.
“This is the first time in 34 years that the March event will not take place,” the company said in a written statement. “We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation.”
The cancellation delivers a financial hit to downtown restaurants, bars, hotels and other businesses, many of which have come to count on free-spending attendees of the sprawling annual conference.
It also could be a big financial blow for SXSW itself, depending on its insurance coverage and how it opts to handle possible requests for refunds.
The city’s disaster declaration might help SXSW from an insurance perspective, however, because standard cancellation policies for special events typically provide coverage only if a cancellation is involuntary, according to insurance experts.
For the broader Austin metro area, the decision to scrap the event is a negative blow for economy, but not a huge one. A report commissioned by SXSW last year pegged the economic impact of the 2019 festival at about $356 million, which would equate to about a quarter of 1% of the region’s estimated $150 billion annual economy.
SXSW officials didn’t address the possibly of issuing refunds in its written statement Friday. “We are exploring options to reschedule the event and are working to provide a virtual SXSW online experience as soon as possible for 2020 participants,” it said.
“For our registrants, clients and participants, we will be in touch as soon as possible and will publish an FAQ,” it said.
Amber Gunst, chief executive of the Austin Technology Council, called the cancellation a major disappointment, although she said city officials had little choice.
“The city made the only decision viable to them at this point,” Gunst said.
“But it will cause a significant economic impact on the local small businesses that were in need of this revenue, so it would be great if Austinites would go out and support those businesses.”
She said her organization is working with local companies that had been planning to participate in SXSW to assess how to proceed.
Austin’s disaster declaration Friday that effectively axed the event came at the end of a week in which SXSW resisted doing so itself, even as coronavirus fears prompted other conferences to be shelved nationally and globally, spurred a wave of travel cancellations and fueled steep downturns in global financial markets.
Austin public health officials previously had backed SXSW’s decision to press on, saying nixing the festival wouldn’t make the city any safer from the virus.
But Dr. Mark Escott, interim medical director and health authority for Austin Public Health, said Friday that there now is evidence that allowing SXSW to take place could accelerate the spread of coronavirus.
The origin of travelers to the conference from around the world was a key concern that Austin Public Health couldn’t mitigate, Escott said, because many would have had to be placed under quarantine upon arrival and possibly would have violated it to attend anyway.
Still, he said that there have been no confirmed coronavirus cases yet in the Austin area. The first test of coronavirus in a Travis County patient has come back negative, he said, although more tests have been sent out.
Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt said Friday that she will sign an emergency declaration similar to the city’s that will be in effect countywide, although it’s unclear how the two declarations will affect other local events that attract crowds, such as Rodeo Austin later this month and various upcoming races at Circuit of the Americas.
Local health officials said they’ll implement a plan for all events to track data, such as crowd density and the origins of attendees, before determining if cancellations are warranted. They said events that don’t attract clientele from overseas lack the same level of risk as SXSW, which has a global following.
The cancellation of SXSW comes in the wake of decisions by dozens of scheduled participants and companies to bail on the event in recent days, including high-profile names like NBC Universal, Apple, Netflix, Twitter and Intel. Many said they were doing so as part of broad discretionary travel bans they had instituted for their employees because of coronavirus fears.
In addition, a petition on Change.org describing SXSW this year as “irresponsible amid an outbreak” and requesting that it be canceled had garnered about 55,000 signatures as of Friday evening.
Mike Rollins, chief executive of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, said in a written statement that the chamber respects the decisions by the city and county to make emergency declarations even though SXSW has been canceled this year as a result.
Still, “our thoughts are with the many small businesses in Austin that depend on major events like SXSW to keep their doors open,” Rollins said in the statement.
According to SXSW’s economic impact study for last year, visitors to Austin booked 51,500 room nights in local hotels during the 2019 event. The analysis pegged the “attendance impact” by credentialed participants and single ticket holders at SXSW events at $182.1 million, although economic impact studies generally include multipliers that inflate direct spending.
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(American-Statesman staffers Mark Wilson and Kara Carlson contributed to this report.)
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Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
