The Inn Crowd with Chris Kandziora

Chris Kandziora, the Ojai Valley Inn's Sales and Marketing Manager, could very well have been the busiest man in Ojai during the pandemic. In March 2020 as the first lockdown went into effect, Chris had to manage the ramping down of the huge facility, calling the wedding parties, the conferences and conventions, thousands of booked guests, as well as furloughing most of its 800 employees - then he had to manage its ramping up as restrictions loosened later in the summer, then another lockdown in the fall. He was also the Inn's point person for the coordinated pandemic response effort involving the City of Ojai and the Ojai Unified School District. Now, with the pandemic hopefully in the rear-view mirror, the Ojai Valley Inn is steaming ahead with the hotel rooms near capacity and the group business surging back as a restless country gets moving again. The quarantine was not an idle time, however. Chris talks about how the Inn took advantage of the downtime to upgrade many of its 300+ rooms and transformed its iconic Spa with a $3 million makeover, how the Inn hosted the fabled Meadowood Resort's restaurant staff at the Inn's Farmhouse after the property was devastated during the Napa fires of last year, and famed chef Nancy Silverton's food events at the Farmhouse. Not to mention hosting an entire season of the wildly popular American Idol in a COVID bubble. We also talked about his friendship with Buffalo Bills' general manager Brandon Beane, growing up in Waukesha, Wisconsin in a restaurant family, going into the hospitality business after college and his talented interior designer wife Janelle, his two soccer-playing sons and walleye ("they taste like candy"). We did not talk about how the popularity of golf exploded during the pandemic, Hudson Bay Company's trade goods or the Real Madrid FC.