“Emirati and Saudi visitor numbers are increasing and many of them are there for medical tourism, staying for 30 days.”
-Ed Fuller, president and chief executive of the Orange County Visitors' Association, explaining to The National why his is the first U.S. regional tourist organization to have a permanent office in Dubai.
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Ironically, we recently hosted a young man from Saudi Arabia in our home while his younger brother was in Southern California for medical reasons.
The five-member OC team's mission in Dubai is to attract more nationals from the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states to visit the sixth most populous county in the U.S.
After noting the Disneyland resort district in Anaheim, The National ends its piece not-so-flatteringly: “In 1994, Orange County was the first U.S. county to declare bankruptcy.”
One assumes Fuller's minions are downplaying that factoid in their sales pitches.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.