What Makes Orlando’s Best the Best?

No other “best of” contest cares about getting it right as much as Orlando’s Best does, period. What sets Orlando’s Best apart is our relentless aim to find and recognize the very best companies and places that the Orlando metro area has to offer.
We’re able to find the best because we do it differently:
» No pay to play — participation is free.
» You choose the nominees; we don’t.
» Online reviews help determine the winners.

Gone are the days of the glorified popularity contest that allows companies to win with an endless supply of duplicate votes provided by employees. With Orlando’s Best, tricksters are unable to manipulate the results!

STEPPING UP OUR GAME

Did you know? We take pride in ensuring our results are fair and accurate.

#1: Text Message Registration
To reduce duplicates, our voting software utilizes text message verification. This security feature is a great boon to maintaining the integrity of your vote.
#2: BBB Partnership
Could a company truly be named the “best” if they’ve lost their accreditation with the Better Business Bureau? No, and neither should companies with negative BBB ratings.
Thanks to our local BBB office, which provided access to its expansive company data, we were able to filter out those that came up short.

HOW IT WORKS

There are three stages to Orlando’s Best, all of which may increase a contestant’s chances of winning:

Nominations
September 4 – 15, 2023 — We launched by opening up the nominations to anyone living in the Orlando metro area.

Voting
October 9 – 13, 2023 — After determining the top nominees in each category, we opened up the voting round.
Nominees didn’t mess around either. Many got the word out to their customers on social media. In the end, we came away with the top three finalists in each category.

Reviews
October 14, 2022 – October 13, 2023 — In reality, the contest started before it even started! We counted the reviews and ratings for each finalist from the previous twelve calendar months.

Announcing the Winners
November 30, 2023 — Once all the data was in, we added the vote total to the review score for each finalist. This final score determined the winners.
We were so grateful for the support we received over the past few months and we had a great time celebrating with all of you! Thank you!!

Are you as excited as we are for the night of Thursday, November 30th? Since this is a new event we want share with you what to expect.

Please quickly read through the items below. If you have any questions, please contact us and we’ll get right back to you.

Ticket Info

Tickets are required to be purchased in advance. Note, we will not be selling tickets at the event or allowing entry without a ticket.

In the dashboard, make sure each of your tickets are assigned and include UNIQUE contact information for each guest. Unassigned tickets or tickets with duplicate contact details are not eligible to win door prizes.

Tickets will be emailed/texted directly to each guest by Wednesday at 7pm.

What to Wear

Dress in the best you have! At the awards ceremony you’ll see fancy gowns and dapper tuxedos. This is a night to celebrate you, Orlando’s Best, so dress like it!

Timeline

Doors open at 7:00pm and we expect to end around 9:00pm.

Location and Parking

Our event is at the Rosen Event Center at 11184 S Apopka Vineland Rd in Orlando. However, don’t confuse it with the Rosen Centre hotel. That is not the same place!

Upon arrival look for the sigh that says Rosen JCC. Parking is FREE and right next to the entrance of the building.

Door Prizes

If you signed up to bring an approved door prize, please bring it with you to the event and hand it in at the registration table.

If you’d like to sponsor a door prize, submit your door prize here.

Red Carpet

After registration you’ll walk the red carpet. We’ve hired an experienced photographer to capture the moment for your entire team. Please, no selfie’s on the red carpet before the event starts. You’ll be able to do that after the program is over.

Drinks

The caterer is providing a bar that serves beer and wine. If you’re a VIP ticket holder, we’ll give you a drink ticket at the registration table.

Entertainment

The program will begin with a welcome by Brodie Tyler and then live comedy entertainment by Moody McCarthy. We’re flying him in from NYC to entertain us for the evening!

Awards Presentation

Although we have nearly 300 categories in this year’s awards, at the awards ceremony we will only be announcing the results for about 50 of them. Basically, those who purchased tickets will hear their category’s results.

NOTE: If you’re bringing a guest who represents a different candidate, please let us know right away so we can make sure their category is also announced.

Once your category is announced, please make your way to the stage for another photo opportunity with Brodie handing you a certificate. Bring the entire team, if you like! Don’t worry though… you are not expected to give a speech. It’s just a photo opp.

Announcing Winners

If you’re unable to make it to our awards ceremony, that’s unfortunate because it’s going to be a fun evening! That said, we will be announcing the winners for all categories on our website the very next day, so stay tuned.

Ballots for the 2023 Orlando’s Best Awards are in, and you folks knocked it out of the park. We are overwhelmed by the support we received, both in voter turnout, and company support!

The businesses and attractions that were up for voting in their respective categories were nominated by Orlando metro area residents in October. The best of the best earned their spots on the ballot.

Thousands of votes were cast to show support for businesses and attractions in our community. We were overwhelmed with the enthusiastic response and can’t wait to share the finalists of each category.

What Happens Now

We want the Orlando’s Best Awards to be as fair as possible, so our team is working hard to calculate the results and verify the findings. We use a scoring system that relies on a combination of votes from Orlando area residents and reviews from Google.

Count Votes

Who had the most votes? Most business awards are prone to spamming, duplicate votes, or cheating. Orlando’s Best only counts unique votes for each category, and we use text message verification for each ballot. While technology makes counting easy, we still need to verify the results.

BBB Review

The Orlando’s Best has partnered with the Better Business Bureau to certify our finalists. The top vote-getters must also have a passing grade with the BBB in order to become a finalist. Their rating system utilizes a grading scale just like you used in school, going from an A+ down to an F, graded on 17 different factors. This rating represents a business’s overall trustworthiness and their good-faith efforts to address customer concerns.

Count Reviews

The Orlando’s Best isn’t like most “Best of” contests, which simply count votes. We realize that the community has already been showing their support for the “best” by leaving reviews all year long, so we’re going to count every 5-star review published on Google within the last 12 months.

Calculate Score

While votes and reviews signify great work in the last year, overall ratings tell us how nominees have done long term. The mean rating from these platforms will be used in conjunction with 5-star reviews and votes to determine the winners.

Number of Votes + (Number of 5-star Reviews x Average Rating) = Score

Announce Finalists

The top nominees of each category will be publicly announced once we’ve verified our results. Finalists will also be notified by letter and email as soon as possible.

Announce Winners

Winners will be announced at the Orlando’s Best Awards Ceremony in November. Finalists will be invited to purchase tickets for the celebration. The ceremony includes a red carpet entrance, photos, and other special prizes and opportunities.

Thank You

We’re grateful to everyone for the support and participation in this year’s Orlando’s Best Awards. It’s been a lot of fun, and we’re already looking forward to next year’s contest!

Orlando’s Best 2023 is in full swing, recognizing the best businesses and places in our community.

The awards include over 200 individual categories, and uses a combination of 5-star reviews, online ratings, and community votes to determine the winners of each respective category.

Our nominees were selected by Orlando metro residents in September, and the top fifteen of each category are moving on to the voting round. Voting takes place online from October 9 – 13, 2023. Anyone with a Orlando metro area zip code and mobile phone can vote.

When voters register their ballots, a confirmation code will be sent via text message. Enter the code to finalize and submit your votes.

While you can only vote once for each category, feel free to come back during the voting period to support your favorites in the dozens of other categories available.

Don’t Miss the Hump Day Giveaway!

We’re excited to announce a Hump Day Giveaway during the voting period. For every new voter you refer after registering your ballot, you’ll be entered into a weekly drawing for a nice prize. We’ve got a new prize every week while voting is open, and they are fantastic.

Details about the Hump Day Giveaway are available on the voting page.

When Will We Know the Results?

After voting closes on October 13, we’ll announce the finalists (the top 3 in each category) as soon as we have confirmed the votes and vetted our list with the BBB. But that’s not where it ends!

In addition to votes, the winner of each category is also determined by their online reviews from Google. Overall ratings and the number of 5-star reviews from the previous 12 months are counted. Our team will take a little time to confirm the review scores for each finalist and tally that with the vote total.

Once the final scores have been determined, we’ll announce the winners at the Orlando’s Best Awards Ceremony first before publishing them online. The ceremony is tentatively scheduled for end of November, though we’ll keep you updated as we get closer.

For more details about the 2023 Orlando’s Best, see our details page.

If you’re on the ballot for our 2023 Orlando’s Best Business Awards, congratulations! As a nominee, you earned your spot by having a good mix of nominations and reviews. Out of tens of thousands of local businesses, we narrowed it down to just over 3,000 nominees that will move on to the voting round.

Now that you’ve been named a nominee, the next step would be to claim your nomination.

Why do you need to claim your nomination?

It helps us verify your business information.

You would be shocked if you knew how much time and effort our team spends verifying candidate information. Besides getting the business name and category right, we’re comparing information and addresses across Google, Facebook, Yelp, the BBB, and your websites for all locations in Idaho to make sure that all of your votes and reviews are credited accordingly.

But we’re not asking for your pity (we did this to ourselves!), just for your help. 

When you claim your nomination, you have the opportunity to help us get it right so we can make sure we are as fair and accurate as possible.

It establishes a point of contact.

Some of our nominees are sole proprietors, forging their own path with the unique skills they possess. Others have an empire across Florida, with dozens or even hundreds of employees. Either way, all of you are important to our community and it would be great if we knew who to present the nomination to.

We think we’re pretty awesome, but we are not going to assume that you’re automatically going to know the pertinent info for our awards. Claiming your nomination also helps us notify the right person when your business is nominated or if you become a finalist.

It helps us… and YOU!

It’s true! Claiming your nomination for Orlando’s Best can make it better. High levels of engagement drive the adjustments we make year-to-year. We do the best we can to achieve a level playing field.

Categories with few nominations and even fewer claimed nominations get less attention. They may be absorbed by another category or disappear altogether.

Categories with a lot of competitors and claimed nominations are likely to get more attention and be retained from year to year. This doesn’t mean they’re scored differently, but that it’s more likely we’ll add categories that are more narrowly defined, giving every business in that group better odds and a fairer shake.

Claiming your nomination can even give you an edge when you need it. Ties in scoring aren’t frequent, but when they occur the nod goes to a company who claimed their nomination if their opponent did not.

So, when in doubt, always claim your nomination!

For our first-ever Orlando’s Best Awards, we have our hands full with, at first count, over 3,000 nominated companies and places… Wow!

The nomination period was open from September 4 through Friday, the 15th. We got the word out over social media and through your nominations and reviews, it looks like we have plenty of candidates to vet.

What’s Next?

This is where we really get to work. To truly find “the best” that Orlando has to offer, we will painstakingly review each and every candidate. We’ll ensure the category they were nominated for is a good fit. We’ll also ensure all the location data is up to date in our system.

A note on locations… A single location business is easy. We’ll simply count their votes and reviews for the final score. Multiple location businesses are a bit more complicated. Since the quantity of votes and reviews plays a primary role in who wins Orlando’s Best, we didn’t want businesses with multiple locations to have an unfair advantage just because they were bigger. So, we average out the reviews on a per location basis.

This is all part of why it takes so long for us to finalize the nominees. We’ll be working over the next few weeks to get this done as quickly as possible and, hopefully, announce the nominees in early November.

Thank You!

We couldn’t run these awards without the help of the local community, so thank you very much for your support. And, thank you for your nominations, votes, and reviews!

“What Makes Orlando’s Best the Best?”

Good question. Orlando’s Best Awards aim to recognize the best businesses in the greater Orlando area. Using a combination of 5-star reviews, online ratings, and votes, we recognize Orlando’s best businesses across over 200 categories. You can read more about how the awards work right here.

No one cares about getting it right more than Orlando’s Best™ does, period. We are relentless in our pursuit to find and recognize the best places, companies, and organizations in Orlando. We’re able to find the best (with your help) because we do it differently:

• No pay to play — participation is free. While we couldn’t do it without our sponsors, they are still held to the same scoring standards as any business in Orlando’s Best™.
• You choose the nominees and do the voting, not us.
• Online reviews help determine the winners.

TL;DR

The Orlando’s Best Business Awards take place in three stages — nominations, voting, and reputation scoring.

Phase 1: Nominations

Anyone who lives in the Orlando area can nominate a business or organization for Orlando’s Best; you can even nominate yourself! Nominations take place online from September 4 – 15, 2023. Remember; the more nominations you get, the better. The top nominees in each region will progress to the voting round.

Phase 2: Voting

After the nominees have been determined and notified, it’s time to get out the vote. The voting period is October 9 – 13, 2023. Any Orlando area resident with a mobile phone can cast their vote for as many categories as they like, but only one vote for each category. Voting is done through our website and ballots are secured through SMS verification.

Every Wednesday during the voting period we’ll be giving away great prizes via our “Hump Day Giveaway”. Those who referred other voters via our voting application will be automatically entered to win; every referred voter is an additional entry.

Phase 3: Reputation

The top vote-getters for each category in their region will move on as finalists. We’ll announce this as soon as we can after tallying and confirming votes. Finalists are then scored for their online reputation. Specifically, we’ll capture the previous 12 calendar months of reviews leading up to October 13, 2023.

Announcing the Winners

Once all the data is in, we’ll announce the winners at our Orlando’s Best Awards Ceremony, tentatively scheduled for the evening of November 30, 2023 in the Orlando area.

Now let’s kick this party off with some nominations!

Orlando’s Best is an awards contest that is owned and operated by Inbound Systems.