‘Aurora area’s biggest cheerleader’ dies
As an Aurora-area tourism leader for 20 years, Sue Vos helped bring facilities, events and people to the region with her passion for leisure travel and all it can add to the local economy.
Vos, who recently retired from her leadership post at the Aurora Area Convention and Tourism Bureau, died Tuesday morning after a battle with cancer. She was 63.
“Sue had amazing passion for things that she believed in,” said Laurie DiBerardino, the convention and visitors bureau’s director of public relations and marketing. “She really believed in this area. She really believed in the dollars and cents and the economics of tourism and what it really brings to the table.”
Vos was respected throughout the state for her work lobbying legislators about the economic benefits of tourism, and she was known around Aurora for growing the convention and visitors bureau and bringing several notable events and developments, DiBerardino said.
When Vos took over as the bureau’s second director, it covered five communities. Vos expanded its territory to 10: Aurora, Batavia, Big Rock, Hinckley, North Aurora, Montgomery, Plano, Sandwich, Sugar Grove and Yorkville.
Aside from helping promote hotel development in the area, Vos also helped bring the Solheim Cup women’s golf tournament to Sugar Grove in 2009, the Raging Waves water park to Yorkville and the Timber Creek Convention Center to Sandwich in 2008.
In recent years, Vos served on the executive board for Visit Illinois, the state’s visitor industry alliance. She served a three-year term as president of the Illinois Council of Convention and Visitor Bureaus and as an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University teaching tourism management, destination marketing and international tourism.
Vos was recognized in 2009 as an Aurora Woman of Distinction and in 2004 with Visit Illinois’ Government Affairs award, according to her biography on the convention and visitors bureau’s website.
Vos leaves behind one son, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.
“She was the Aurora area’s biggest cheerleader,” DiBerardino said. “She really put this area on the map.”