Locked out San Francisco hotel workers flew to Hawaii to picket outside two Sheraton hotels in Waikiki that are owned by the same company as their employer in San Francisco.

About a third of the workers at the Sheraton Waikiki and the Royal Hawaiian hotels stayed away from work Friday in sympathy with the 20 union members from San Francisco, hotel officials said.

"Both those hotels are owned by a company that also owns the Sheraton Palace in San Francisco, where our members have been locked out," said Valerie Lapin, spokeswoman for Local 2 of the hotel and restaurant workers union, Unite-Here.

The Sheraton Waikiki and the Royal Hawaiian, as well as two other Sheraton hotels in Waikiki, are owned by Kyo-Ya Co. and operated by Starwood Hotels.

The union paid to fly the 20 workers from San Francisco to Honolulu. They planned to return to San Francisco Friday night, she said.

Some 4,000 workers have been locked out from 14 San Francisco hotels in a monthlong labor dispute.

That city has been the scene of visible and noisy picket lines since Sept. 29, when Local 2 called a strike at four hotels. The hotels responded by locking out workers at the 10 others two days later.

The workers ended the strike Oct. 13 as promised, but the 14 hotels declared the lockout would continue until agreement on a new contract is reached.

Operators of hotels at the center of the dispute and representatives from the hotel workers union continued to negotiate on a new contract Thursday.

The strife already has led to lost business.

Organizers of the Home Entertainment 2004 Show, scheduled for a four-day run next week at The Westin-St. Francis hotel, announced on Friday that they were canceling the event because of the dispute. In 2003, the show drew more than 15,000 attendees and exhibitors.

"The disruption of services would (affect) our exhibitors and show attendees, and we had no choice but to cancel the event," Adam Marder, president of the company that sponsors the trade show, said in a statement.

In Hawaii, the union has about 1,000 workers at the Sheraton Waikiki and about 400 at the Royal Hawaiian, according to Jason Ward, a spokesman for Local 5 of the hotel workers union.

"The big thing here for us is we understand Local 2's fight is our fight, and our members understand that," Ward said.

About 30 percent of those workers didn't go to work Friday, mostly housekeepers and kitchen staff, said David Uchiyama, spokesman for Starwood Hotels in Hawaii.