Millennium Partners is in default on its two-year $90 million loan for the 277-room Four Seasons Hotel San Francisco, according to the developer.

The luxury condo and hotel developer and operator has purposefully stopped making debt payments as a strategy to jump start renegotiating the debt. The Four Seasons is the second luxury hotel to default on its debt payments in recent weeks. The owners of the 393-room Renaissance Stanford Court Hotel in Nob Hill defaulted on a $89 million loan.

Alan Reay, president of Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group, called the Four Seasons San Francisco action a “default of convenience” and said it was the only way for Millennium Partners to force the special server on the loan to enter negotiations. He said the more deluxe a hotel, the more likely it is to be hurt by the recession, because the costs of operating a true full-service hotel are not easy to pare down.

“To see the caliber of hotel like Renaissance Stanford Court and the Four Seasons going into default in the early stages of this downturn is not a good sign,” said Reay. “It means this is going to be deep, it’s going to be long, and this is going to effect everybody.”

In the last 60 days 213 hotel owners have defaulted on their loans in California, a 184 percent jump over the previous 60 days, Reay said. Reay predicted that the vast majority of hotels that were financed with loans that tapped the commercial mortgage-backed securities market between 2005 and 2007 will end up in default, a number that could top 2,000 in California alone.

“We’re in a deep recession and hotels are suffering the most of any real estate class right now,” said Reay.

A report by Atlas Hospitality estimates that room revenues in California are down 21.5 percent in 2009 and that values are 50 to 80 percent lower than they were at the market’s peak from 2005 to 2007.