Honoring O.C.’s Best Travelers’ Aides
The Orange County Tourism Council hoped to get a few hundred nominations for its awards honoring workers in the industry. It wound up with 722, from as far away as New Zealand and Singapore, according to council director Bruce Brown.
One nominee from the Disneyland Pacific Hotel gave his own car roof rack to a guest from Utah with a damaged rack. In Newport Beach, a Portofino Beach Hotel worker tracked down a woman from Norway at her mother’s home in Mississippi to ask if a lost cross and chain was hers. It was--an 18-carat gold heirloom that had been her grandmother’s.
The service excellence awards are in seven categories: lodging, culture, attractions, restaurants, transportation, shopping and visitor bureaus/chambers of commerce.
Judges will winnow down each category to three nominees, who will get the Hollywood treatment Jan. 21 at Tinseltown in Anaheim. In addition to seven category winners, a top award named after Knott’s Berry Farm founder Walter Knott will be handed out.
Travelers spent 21.3 million days in Orange County in 1997, compared with 37.4 million in Los Angeles County and 26.5 million in San Diego County, according to figures from the state Trade and Commerce Agency. Visitors spent $3.9 billion in Orange County in 1996, the last year for which the agency had figures. That compared with $12.2 billion in Los Angeles, $6.2 billion in San Francisco, and $5.3 billion in San Diego.
