Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : COUNTY : Tourism Falls Short of Projected Record

The long, hot days of summer were just that for many Orange County businesses that had banked on tourists forsaking overseas vacations this year.

Launched on a wave of optimism, tourist trade lagged badly behind projections at the midpoint of summer, but managed to rally in August and finish strongly.

Officials had hoped for a record year in an industry that annually attracts more than 30 million visitors to the county. Record numbers, however, failed to materialize.

One thing that hurt business, officials said, was the popularity of Expo ’86 in Vancouver, which is expected to have drawn 20 million visitors by the time it closes Oct. 13.

“The Western states are our prime market, although we draw from other areas,” said Bill Snyder of the Anaheim Area Visitors and Convention Bureau. “We underestimated the impact Expo had on those markets. They are drawing from the same markets we traditionally draw from. And that’s probably the logical reason our trade fell in July.”

An official with the state Office of Tourism in Sacramento had another idea about what cause the shortfall.

“There was so much talk about the terrorism in Europe, the cheap price of gasoline and the good dollar-peso exchange rate that there was a lot of enthusiasm,” he said. “But perhaps it was talked up so much that some people said, ‘It’s going to be too crowded, maybe we ought to hold off until later.’ ”