Orange County is the No. 3 “large city” destination—bested only by Los Angeles and New York City—in a national assessment by Resonance Consultancy Ltd. in New York.
Resonance crunched comments from 270 million online postings—largely on the travel website TripAdvisor and a section of consumer ratings provider Yelp—and from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce. It then ranked cities overall based on six areas: culture, sight-seeing, entertainment, sports, culinary offerings and lodging.
Orange County cracked the top 10 in four of the six categories and wasn’t ranked for sports or sight-seeing.
The overall No. 3 ranking for its category was in part based on “how many good or excellent reviews are received by a destination regardless of its size or number of visitors,” according to the report.
An indexed ranking of 121 U.S. cities set a per capita criteria—rankings per 100,000 visitors—allowed cities of varying size to be compared to each other and on that list Orange County was No. 7—behind Portland, Ore.; three Hawaiian islands; Los Angeles; and New York City.
