Are you among those people for whom the end of the year signals a need to reflexively pause and ruminate on the previous 364 days? We are too, despite warnings from leading health professionals about the dangers of compulsive pausing and ruminating.
We’d kick the habit if we we could, but like kind old ladies who take in stray cats and those poor folks who can’t part with 20-year-old McDonald’s wrappers, we just can’t help ourselves. We can’t stop remembering! There are simply too many great things to relive from the year that was here at Tahiti Village. Besides, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. This morning when we opened our email we found the following message:
“Do a blog post on everything that happened here in 2013.”
Boss tells you to retrieve and share data from your stored bank of memories, you do it. In previous years the only question would be in which direction we would remember: from December backwards to January or January forward to December. The downside to both was the delusion that your memory had more gigabytes than it actually did. In reality it just couldn’t be trusted to recall every odd factoid from March or exciting new vending machine addition (Pepe’s Pork Rinds, anyone?) from June. That’s why this year we wrote it all down.
So here for your edification and enjoyment, without further delay and in no particular order, is a handy-dandy summary of events and occurrences (plus one or two statistical bonbons) from 2013. Let the bullet points fly!
- In late November we doubled our social media presence with the launch of the Tahiti Village Facebook page. If you haven’t already, please visit our site and Like us. And don’t forget, we’re also on Twitter. Be sure to Follow us and receive information on your home resort 140 characters at a time.
- It’s one thing to say our aquatic attractions and resort activities are popular. It’s another to support the claim with raw statistics. In 2013 we actually took a head count and came up with the following set of numbers: Nearly 20,000 people (19,689 to be exact) participated in a property-planned activity, 225,909 swam in the main pool and 123,336 floated around the Lazy River. The more the merrier indeed.
- Towers 1 and 2 were the objects of several improvement projects during the year. Units received new carpet, 42-inch HDTVs, armoires and new stackable washer-dryers, which replaced the all-in-ones. Finally, dryers that dry!
- Did you know the Tahiti Village housekeeping department cleaned and released 3,804 rooms ahead of schedule? Talk about elbow grease.
- Our annual Easter egg hunt drew a large contingent of kids and their parents to the Island Courtyard for a day of fun and games. How many attended? We’re not eggxactly sure.
- Lu-Wow! Our 13 weekly summer luaus drew a total of 3,362 attendees, or roughly 258 per luau. That’s a lot of kalua pork!
- And speaking of the luau, we changed its traditional day and location from Saturday poolside to Sunday inside the new Island Courtyard. We made the switch to give the most people the best opportunity to attend.
- We won the TripAdvisor Award of Excellence for a second straight year. Yay!
- We earned another Interval International Premier Award. Yay!
- We maintained our standing as an RCI Gold Crown Resort property. Yay!
- In response to numerous requests, we added a Saturday morning grocery run to accommodate owners arriving after the last supermarket shuttle Friday morning. Who knows what’s in store next.
- Lots of people went lots of places on our shuttle busses this past year. We transported 8,854 to the Fremont Street Experience, 5,253 to the grocery store, 2,892 to Red Rock Canyon and 1,768 to Town Square.
- Summer Saturdays got a lot livelier with the debut of our pool party hosted by DJ Brit Lee. In addition to spinning all the hits, Lee presided over poolside activities such as the hula hoop contest, water volleyball tournament and not-for-money bingo. You won’t believe how much fun you can have on a Saturday afternoon in Vegas.
- In June we installed motorized chair lifts next to each body of water on property. They give our owners and guests with disabilities equal access to the pool, Lazy River and hot tubs. They are permanently affixed to the deck at the edge of each aquatic attraction.
- Two of our favorite guests, NHRA drag racer Terry McMillen (he of the fast car) and psychic Gary Spivey (he of the big hair), paid their annual visits to Tahiti Village. Will Gary be here in 2014? Only he knows for sure.
- In the fall movie nights went year-round when we began screening films 6 p.m. Saturdays in Tower 5. They will continue in that location until summer, when we resume our Wednesday Dive-In Movie night at the main pool and Saturday night movie at the Island Courtyard.
- A costumed crowd attended our first Oktoberfeast and Festival to celebrate the Halloween season. Games, delicious food truck offerings, and costume and pumpkin pie eating contests awaited attendees inside the Island Courtyard.
- Here’s what we wrote this past summer in our newsletter about the arrival of new vending machines: We are happy to announce our new partnership with First Class Vending. In our quest to give you the best of everything, we felt an affiliation with a world-renowned snack dispenser was only fitting. The company consistently replenishes inventory with all your favorites, but is also on the cutting edge of product delivery. Each First Class Vending machine is equipped with infrared technology that detects whether the vended product has dropped. How many times have you stuck money in a vending machine, punched the button and then watched in horror as your Funyuns hung teasingly by a bag edge over the drop zone? Those days are over. You can find our new vending machines, 40 in all, on each floor except the 10th in Tower 5.
And with that we come to the end of our reminiscence on the year 2013. We’re all out of bullet points, and we’re ready to take a break until January 1st, when we’ll begin our survey of all the 2014 events, occurrences and oddities we will look back on this time next year. We wish you all a great new year and look forward to seeing you soon.