Dear Rick:
As the host of KOCE's Inside OC, you nearly have a monopoly when it comes to getting important stories on local television.
I watched a rerun tonight of your recent interview with embattled OC Treasurer/Tax Collector Chriss (I'm sick of people emailing me on this. His first name is spelled this way.) Street and Nick Berardino, general manager of the OC (government) Employees Association.
For those of you out of the loop, Street is the man in control of a few billion dollars of our
It's pretty well-known that I'll go almost anywhere I'm invited if there's free food and booze, but some invites make more sense than others. Movie premieres, I understand. Art gallery openings, sure. But a meeting held by a package tour company to pitch their getaways to local travel agents? I mean, I don't make near enough money to afford African safaris or whatnot, especially since some of them cost as much as my rent for the entire year. And I'm fairly sure that most of you who pick our free
PhoCusWright Inc., a market research firm with offices in Connecticutt, New York and Europe, has found a lone bright spot in a travel industry that will continue to be brutally battered well into 2010: online bookings.
"The main online travel agencies should benefit from the ongoing secular shift in transactions from traditional points of purchase toward the Internet," says Jack Fuller, the author of what's actually a 2008 market trends study that's been updated for 2009.
Close readers of everything that Clockwork churns out for your viewing enjoyment may have caught the July 31 post on online bookings being the lone bright spot in a travel industry that will continue to
be brutally battered well into 2010. That was based on the findings of market research firm PhoCusWright Inc.
Perhaps PhoCusWright should compare notes with HIS Global Insight, whose data shows business travel will also recover next year.
We missed this item on the LA Times's Funland blog on Monday. Apparently, Irvine water park Wild Rivers, which has spent the better part of its decade proclaiming it would soon shut down but never actually doing so, may finally see its last day in 2010.In its place would be a seemingly identical water park, owned by the same people as before, but with a different name: Splash Canyon.
