Edgewater Beach & Golf Resort Wins 2008 Gold Tee Award

Panama City Beach, Fla. (April 24, 2008) – Meetings & Conventions (M&C) magazine recently announced its 2008 Gold Tee competition winners, and the Edgewater Beach & Golf Resort was chosen as one of the best hotels for playing golf and holding meetings. The Edgewater Beach & Golf Resort is now a 5 time winner of this prestigious award. This highly respected award is given annually to outstanding golf/meeting properties worldwide. Winners of the Gold Tee Award were nominated and selected by the readers of M&C based on each property’s overall excellence.

“The meeting industry’s most well-regarded critics, the readers of M&C, have made their selection for the best in the world. M&C’s core readership of over 70,000 corporate, incentive, and association meeting planners know quality when they experience it. They have made their votes count, selecting the golf properties they believed to be outstanding,” states Bernard W. Schraer, Meetings & Conventions Group Publisher.

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Your County Tax Dollars at Work – Thomas Drive and Joan

The intersection of Thomas Drive and Joan Avenue in Panama City Beach is getting a bit of a facelift with sidewalks going in, the curb structure being redone, and the pedestrian island being rebuilt.

Recently the lift station on Joan Avenue was redone and landscaping and sidewalks were installed.

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FSU Flying Circus on Panama City Beach – Update

The tent is up, the a/c is cranking and the stage is being set for performances to begin next Friday, June 13th at 7pm.

The tent consists of 10 pieces with a total weight of over 10,000 lbs. Each one of six “straights” weight around 900 lbs and each of the four “rounds” weight around 1200 lbs. The “straights” are the middle peices and the “rounds” are the ends.

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2008 Hurricane Season Information – Tropical Storm Arthur

As the 2008 hurricane season begins, pcbdaily will provide updates as often as relevant to help keep everyone abreast of the storms brewing and how they will affect our area in Panama City Beach.

Currently Arthur is out there, but it as been downgraded to a Tropical Depression from its recent upgrade to a tropical storm. The current location is over southeast Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula. Winds are at 30mph, pressure is at 1006mb, and the storm is moving at 6 mph, SW.

For all names storms and a whole preparedness checklist, check after the break.

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Lifeguards on Panama City Beach

The long and short of it is: Should we have lifeguards on our beaches in Panama City Beach? And, if so, why and how will we pay for it?

This comes up almost every year after drownings, and after the tragic deaths of two swimmers over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, it has come up again.

Do we need lifeguards? Could we have prevented the deaths over the weekend if a lifeguard system was in place?

I was listening to the Burnie Thompson Show the other morning and they were discussing that all the beach attendants/vendors are required to be lifeguard certified as part of the permitting process with them running a beach business. It was reported that many of them performed successful rescues over the weekend.

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Wild Heron Owners Offered Full Golf Membership at Shark's Tooth

Last August when St. Joe bought Shark’s Tooth Golf Course including a 10 acre practice facility, a 21,000 square foot clubhouse, a huge cart storage facility, a 4,000 square foot pro shop, four lighted HydroCourt Har-Tru tennis courts and the private 100? waterfront beach club property, golf memberships were no longer available to Wild Heron property owners.

This was a huge issue with existing owners because it no longer allowed they to purchase a private golf membership, including all future owners. So, if you purchased a homesite and built a home, you could not golf on the course that helps define your neighborhood. Stinks, right?

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Panama City Beach Needs more Branded Hotels

Kaoru Chikushi from HVS International wrote a piece on Panama City Beach that was published on HospitalityNet.org titled The Need for More Branded Hotels in Panama City Beach, Florida.

You should read it, but I’ll summarize it here.

Chikushi estimates that approximately 7 million visit Panama City Beach each year with around 250,000 spring breakers and 15,000 “snowbirds”. Again, not sure where the numbers came from, but 250,000 sounds much more realistic that the “millions” others in the media tout.

I was glad to see Chikushi references Panama City Beach as “once known as the Redneck Riviera” and describes our area as being in an “era of transformation.” Signaled by the new airport and Pier Park, she finds justification in Panama City being named the #1 place to own real estate in the next 5 years (the Business 2.0 article).

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Destinations around the country searching for tourists

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” has been swapped for “do Vegas right now.” According to the New York Times, the slogan was swapped for something that had a stronger call to action.

It is no secret that the cost of living is going up in real time. With gas prices here quickly approaching 4 bucks a gallon, the cost to travel is also quickly becoming a huge deciding factor on where people are going, if they are going at all.

In the New York Times article, Urgency Replaces Subtlety in Summer’s Struggle for Visitors, the second destination mentioned as making a change in their advertising direction was Panama City Beach. Peter Yesawich was quoted, “There is a palpable nervousness on the part of everybody in the industry.” “We’ve seen some of these conditions individually,” Mr. Yesawich said, referring to problems like high fuel prices and reduced capacity on airlines, “but never all of them at once.”

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Bootleg Barbeque Serves Local Flavor

Sorry EmeraldCoast.com and Jan Waddy. I know this is your story, and I’m totally copying it word for word on pcbdaily, but I wanted our readers to see this. I give full credit to the story and article to Jan Waddy and Florida Freedom Newspapers.

I love Bootleg Barbeque and was blown away at how good everything was and how well Josh and his staff treated us. The food was phenomenal.

The article:

PANAMA CITY BEACH – “I’ve been in the restaurant business since before I could drive,” said Josh Daugherty, owner of Bootleg Barbecue.

His first job was at “a little barbecue shack in Sandestin,” Pig’s Alley, which is still around.

“Fifteen years later, I was an executive chef at Santa Rosa Beach Club,” said Daugherty. After going the “fine dining route for many years,” he wanted to do “something a little more fun, barbecue.”

“It’s unpretentious,” said Daugherty, “but still has a lot of integrity to it.”

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Panama City Beach reviewed on GoGirlfriend.com

According to their site, “GG is a travel-based opinion site for women going places. GoGirlfriend is where intelligent women go for travel information that matters. We inform, connect and inspire women to live their travel dreams.”

The site has reviews that date back to 2007 and feature such categories as Adventure, Arts & Culture, Florida Beaches Guide, Luxury, etc.

Their latest Florida review featured Panama City Beach, quoted:

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