[caption id="attachment_67579" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Noel Trainor. "]
Noel Trainor lives a long way from his native island, but the Belfast man was lately reminded of it in a most memorable way when he was recently named Honorary Irish Consul in Honolulu.
Trainor, who hails from Belfast, knows his diplomatic bailiwick well having spent the best part of the last two decades heading up the most prestigious hotel in Honolulu's Waikiki Beach.
Trainor spent years working in the international hotel business before landing feet first in the sands of Waikiki, this as a result of being offered the manager post back in 1991 of the then newly-built, 22-acre Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort and Spa.
His tenure at the helm of the Hilton came to an end with the private equity buy-out of the hotel chain in 2007.
As the Irish Echo reported in an interview last year, Trainor now heads up some of Hawaii's biggest not-for-profits while running his own tourism consultancy, one which boasts a logo-marrying Celtic and Hawaiian design.
"For me, the detail always has meaning, I see a value in my Irish heritage. After all, everyone wants to be
Irish," Trainor said in the interview.
Now, as honorary consul, the father-of-two brings to bear even more credentials as he works to forge ever closer bonds between the island of his birth, and his new island home.
