Rolling Out the Red Carpet in Palm Springs

The Palm Springs Convention Center sits near the base of the San Jacinto Mountains. Photo courtesy Visit Palm Springs.

Rainy weather in Palm Springs “is kind of like celebrity sightings,” said Joseph Jenci, director of sales for the Palm Springs Convention Center, welcoming planners on a soggy New Year’s Day with glasses of Champagne at the start of a fam tour timed to coincide with the 37th Annual Palm Springs International Film Awards. “You hear about it all the time — but you never see it.”

Over the next two days, the reverse was true: The sky intermittently filled with clouds — and celebrity sightings rained down. The latter was thanks to the International Film Awards Gala, which annually assembles the world’s leading actors and directors and other guests at the convention center. The three-day fam was designed to not only give participants a behind-the-scenes look at the logistics of the high-stakes gala, but also a taste of the city’s diverse venues and experiences — the supporting cast for events in Palm Springs.

Home base for the fam, which was hosted by the convention center and Visit Palm Springs, was the 410-room Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel, connected to the convention center. Both are just a few blocks from downtown, where our first stop was for a photo op beneath a 26-foot sculpture of former resident Marilyn Monroe in an iconic pose. The Hollywood vibe continued over dinner at the airy, two-story Lulu California Bistro, where classic movies were projected on the walls.

Outside, on Palm Canyon Drive, the city’s primary shopping and dining district, the streets were filled with people browsing the three-block-long VillageFest, a weekly Thursday night street fair. Our hosts had prearranged shopping credits for us at some of the booths, which gave us a chance to talk with local artisans and vendors. For all its glamour, Palm Springs — which has 45,000 year-round residents — has a friendly, small-town feel.

VillageFest, a weekly street fair in downtown Palm Springs. Photo courtesy Visit Palm Springs.

The next morning I woke, not to rain, but a sunlit view of the granite San Jacinto Mountains, whose 10,000-foot-high peaks make a dramatic backdrop to the city. After breakfast at the nearby Hilton Palm Springs, we stopped at the convention center, which was buzzing with preparations for the gala. “We pride ourselves on being ahead, but we’re a little behind,” confided Christina Sasse, director of operations and producer for the nonprofit Palm Springs International Film Society, which organizes the annual international film festival — this year, films from more than 70 countries were featured.

Sasse had been up nearly all night, she said, as staff worked to dry the rain-soaked concrete so red carpet could be laid on the sidewalk. Despite her tight schedule, Sasse gave our group a tour, including a peek into the kitchen, where staff were preparing desserts for the 2,400 guests expected for the awards dinner. Technicians were finetuning the sound system and screen projections in the 100,000-plus-square-foot Oasis Exhibit Hall, where a sea of tables and chairs and a massive stage were set up. Sasse has a staff of four, and the International Film Awards, a fundraiser for the society and community film initiatives, wouldn’t be what it is without the support of the center’s staff, she said. “Our attendees are the hardest in the world — they are the most challenging. You deal with the one-percenters.” There’s “a ton of nitpicking,” she said, and she counts on center staff to act as another set of eyes.

The center’s Oasis Hall, the day before the Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala.  

Choose Your Adventure

After the tour, we split into two groups. One departed for a tour of mid-century homes, including one owned by Frank Sinatra, in the Movie Colony neighborhood. The rest of us climbed into red jeeps and headed to Indian Canyons, a natural oasis and cultural and natural heritage site managed by the area’s longest occupants, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. At Andreas Canyon, a one-mile loop takes hikers beside a waterfall and through groves of native fan palm trees. The oasis is watered by mountain streams and a massive aquifer beneath the Colorado Desert, where water is forced upward through the San Andreas fault. The area’s innovative approaches to water management have brought numerous regional, national, and international water conferences to Palm Springs, including the Urban Water Institute 2025 Spring Conference.

We met for lunch at the Riviera Resort & Spa, which opened in 1959 and where Rat Pack members Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. regularly performed in the 1960s. Now owned by IHG, the hotel and conference center will close down this spring for a $50-million makeover.

That afternoon, Jenci led a tour of two boutique hotels with just a handful of rooms each — the vintage Trixie Motel, where seven themed rooms were redesigned by drag star Trixie Mattel and the 10-room, desert-toned The Hideaway, designed by mid-century architect Herbert Burns, who has his own sidewalk star on downtown’s Palm Springs Walk of the Stars. The city has more than 80 boutique hotels and one corporate client recently distributed teams across multiple small boutique hotels rather than booking large blocks in one or two hotels, Jenci said.

Dinner was at PS Underground, an interactive dinner theater that grew out of themed gatherings that two locals hosted for their friends, now in a permanent location that can accommodate up to 100 people. Our evening, based on classic TV sitcoms, featured theme song sing-alongs and sitcom-related challenges, held between dinner courses.

Saturday was leisurely, beginning with breakfast on the roof of the art-filled, 168-room Thompson Palm Springs, which opened in 2024 in Palm Springs’ downtown design district. From there, we moved to the Parker Palm Springs resort, four miles from downtown, where an eclectically luxurious 144-room hotel and meeting space are set on 13 acres of lush gardens and groves of citrus trees. With the awards gala just hours away, I spotted one of the night’s film award honorees pacing on a graveled path, talking on his cell phone — and pretended like I didn’t.

As the stars were arriving at the International Film Awards’ red carpet, we had our own red-carpet reception — complete with a Frank Sinatra impersonator — on the Renaissance’s 24,000-square-foot pool deck. Inside the convention center, sparkling gowns and tuxes had replaced the crews that filled the hall just a day before. The Palm Springs International Film Awards has a reputation as the first stop on the road to the Oscars, and the stars were out in full force. Over dinner, we applauded honorees Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, and Palm Springs residents Kate Hudson and Leonardo DiCaprio, among many others.

Music and dancing followed at a giant afterparty at the Parker Palm Springs. I escaped the crowds to where a circle of chairs was arranged around a blazing firepit, tucked away behind hedges, and admired the clouds moving over a full moon.

I snapped back to reality the next morning, departure day. The temporary closure of the Palm Springs International Airport the day before — an FAA ground stop over a regional air-traffic control issue — had canceled dozens of flights, including mine, along with several other fam trip participants, and hundreds of other unhappy travelers. It was a comfort when Jenci and other Visit Palm Springs staff showed up at the airport to offer moral support and practical assistance to our group, handing out granola bars, offering help in arranging for transportation to other airports, and booking extra nights at the Renaissance and dinner reservations to those who were stranded. When I managed to get a rental car and left Palm Springs, just a few hours behind schedule, the delay felt like just one more adventure.

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor